LITERARY MONSTERS

An alien from A. E. Van Vogt's 1939 short story, The Black Destroyer. Only one coeurl appears in the story, although others are mentioned; the third-person narrative calls the alien simply "Coeurl" (used as a proper name, hence the capitalisation; when used as a name for the entire race, "coeurl" is uncapitalised). Coeurl was an intelligent life form that basically resembled a big cat, but with two large tentacles ending in "fingers" emerging from his shoulders, and hairlike tendrils serving for ears, which could send and recieve radio signals. One character also refers to Coeurl as having large forelegs, but these are not described. Coeurl's tentacles, as well as standing in for hands, could kill people by removing phospherous from their bones, and destroy metal by disrupting the electronic tension holding it together.

A group of astronauts took Coeurl aboard their ship, but he was able to escape from his cage, kill several crew members and build his own spacecraft. His project ultimitely failed, however, and he killed himself with his tentacle to avoid being executed by the crew. A coeurl also appeared in another of Vogt's stories, The Voyage of the Space Beagle.

The tentacles on Vogt's coeurl were attatched to the shoulders, and the creature was black in colour, hence the title; Square placed the tentacles on the head, causing them to look like large whiskers, and makes the monster's fur a rather fetching blue-green.

In Jonathan Swift's 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels, Lilliput is a country inhabited by six-inch tall people, at war with Blufescu (also populated by midgets) over which end eggs should be broken at. Thanks to heavily abridged children's editions, the voyage to Lilliput is the best known of Gulliver's travels, but in the full novel he visits a number of other countries, including the giant-filled Brobdinag, the flying island Laputa and the land of the Houyhnhnms, talking horses.