There is a possibly apocryphal claim that a nebulous ‘local legend’ exists about hyenas. Specifically, that they are believed to be able to mimic human voices, in order to lure people away from their camps at night. I remember hearing about this so-called myth several times as a child, but only ever from third hand, english speaking sources, and I’m half convinced that it’s nothing more than the creation of tv writers. Whether an actual legend or not, however, it presents an enticing scenario. One which exists as part of a long tradition of animal themed horror.
There are of course your more obvious examples: your Cujos, your Jaws’ and your Lakes Placid. Going back further you have your big bad wolves, (who can also speak, and imitate other people, depending on the story) witches’ familiars, devilish serpents, and so forth. Each era, and culture, has its own particular take on the concept, in which the animal in question can represent nearly anything that inspires fear, including, on occasion, just a literal big scary animal.
While quite different in form and style than any of the works listed above, I believe that Emiland Kray’s interactive narrative work, You Can Only Turn Left, nonetheless has its place within this tradition. The pink hyenas which lie at the dark center of its twisting maze of words, and years, and sleepless nights, are so perfectly and viscerally realized that, upon finally reaching them, it’s hard to leave them behind. While never literal in any sense, they are nonetheless wholly formed, and when combined with the accompanying visuals, rather iconic. They are also utterly and painfully contemporary.
They are the whispers that speak to you in your own voice, from the dark boundary between yourself and the world at large, and call you into the shadows of resignation. They are born of the other place, the one that lies between people, where capitalism and isolation and precarity run wild, and yet they wear the mask of our own face when they come to us at night. Mocking us. Daring us. Luring us away into the tall, dry grass, where they can feed.
Strangely, the only other work I’m aware of in which the animal antagonist is used in a similar manner is one that you wouldn’t expect. One that will require me to make possibly my hottest literary take to date. That work is Moby Dick. And yes, Moby Dick is horror.
To be fair, there’s far more of Poe or Lovecraft to it than Barker or King, and even the former are much more steeped in the trappings of horror than Melville. In a curious way though, it is precisely the lack of these trappings which make it hit even harder. It’s the kind of horror story which doesn’t announce itself, doesn’t give away the game until it’s already too late. You don’t even know you’re in a horror story until the final act, when the mad captain goes fully mask off, and reveals the terrifying (and terrifyingly human) thing which lies beneath. Because of course, unless tenth grade English class has done us all dirty, it isn’t the whale that’s the monster, but the man.
In You Can Only Turn Left, Kray makes similar use of their twin hyenas. Icons of nature which become terrifying precisely because there is no nature to them. Like Melville’s great white whale, Kray’s hot pink hyenas are expressions of the all-too-human, given external and fearsome form. But where Ahab’s quarry is a stand-in for personal obsession and sickness and self-loathing, the exposed heart of the captain himself with the power to topple a ship; the hyenas are instead all those things which convince us that they come from within. All of the insecurities and pressures and self-isolation that our contemporary world wants us to pathologize within ourselves, so that we do not turn our eye to their true, systemic causes. Hungry predators that whisper our own voices to us.
As horror, Moby Dick was greatly ahead of its time, leaping over both the classically gothic, and the more literal and blood-soaked horror of the twentieth century, and landing squarely within the much softer and more subtle avenue that the genre exists within today. It’s one failing, from a contemporary perspective, is its over insistence on individualizing its most horrific elements. It critiques Ahab, as both a man and as the holder of power, but not the larger networks of power which allowed for first his existence, and then his fatal fall that took down all hands along with it.
You Can Only Turn Left takes this final step. A step which simultaneously leads us deeper down inside ourselves, and further afield within the predatory night-soaked plains of the dominant powers. It recognizes the deeply personal essence of each individual struggle, while still acknowledging the greater, prowling threats that surround us in our hypermodern world. It gives us hot pink hyenas, that hunt us in our dreams, with fangs made of and for everyone we fear that we are failing or losing touch with, and cackle hungrily while they slaughter it all in front of us and inside us.
It gives us a new apex predator for the neoliberal age. One that convinces us we’re killing ourselves, and laughs.