TV Monsters

By Dean Williams

This is a platypus of a piece; there is no denying it. The TV Monsters is part sci-fi tale, part poem, part elegy for a more innocent, vanished time. More than anything else, it's a clear-eyed analysis of what television has done to human civilization.

The story (told mainly in verse) is about a young boy who lives an idyllic country life with his grandfather in mid-twentieth century America. One night the boy has a strange experience in which he believes he has seen aliens who have come for some malevolent purpose. The story takes some twists and turns, but in the end our hero figures out who the real foes of peace, justice and enlightenment are.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dean Williams
• Release date: Dec 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781310591792

Book preview

Preface

A literate person, more perceptive than charitable, might call a work like this a labor of love. With respect to its undoubted want of polish and a certain corny earnestness, I myself would have to agree: I lay it on rather thickly. And a polemic rarely makes for good fiction. Still, it would be more accurate to call this story a labor of loathing. Exactly what it is I loathe—well, you will have to read it to find out! The plot is all mine, but it is chock-full of Marshall McLuhan’s ideas. Any conceptual heft it might possess is due to the work of that Canadian visionary. Not only his ideas are employed but also actual terms he brought into the discourse on media: the continuous present; fetishize; search for identity; new tribalism. On a final note, the story is told in rhyme because it began its life as a short and lighthearted children’s tale. But the more I looked into and thought about the subject, the more I realized that my chosen topic is not really suitable for children…yours or mine. But by that point the narrative’s events and ideas had irrevocably taken form as a series of 4-line stanzas, with a bit of prose stubbornly horning its way in at the very end. The task of maintaining a brisk pace while at the same time describing complex societal forces and transformations was one that neither the rigid verse structure nor my own powers as a writer was always up to. In any event, I have told the story that I wanted to tell. The reader will judge whether it was one worth telling.

A Few Quotations from Marshall McLuhan

The new media are not bridges between man and nature; they are nature.

It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.

All media exist to invest our lives with