Even my imagination was not limitless, and after several hours I'd burn out on building sandcastles and look for something else to do. You would think I'd be grateful to be at the beach every day, but it got boring even before we moved there.

The small office lobby of the beach motel had a bookshelf... most of it was uninteresting, material like Reader's Digest books, but one caught my attention, a novelization of Prophecy. Not the Christopher Walken angel movie, the toxic-waste mutated animal movie. I've never seen the film, and I'm not sure I want to, since it would only spoil my memories of the book.

It was a magnificent book for a ten-year-old. It contained a visceral description of a couple of kids my age being eaten alive ('like a dog breaking chicken bones') along with assorted disembowelings and savagings. The book also went into some detail describing mutated, deformed animals breeding in the wake of a paper mill.

I'd never read anything like it; it would be a couple more years until I was introduced to Stephen King. Unlike King's writing, however, the characterizations were charmless and the book was solely about creeping people out. And I was creeped out; after I finished thumbing through Prophecy I quietly slid it back into place and exited hastily, looking over my shoulder.

While its gruesome exploits frightened me, the protagonist itself, the big monster that was killing everybody, attracted me. Even at that age I unconsciously favored the villain. But more in its favor, it had breasts. It aroused me without my realizing it. A gigantic slavering mutant, its long snout full of daggerlike teeth, eating little kids and slicing men in half with its claws, and it had tits. Big ones. A female monster. I was disappointed when it was killed at the end. I wanted it to go on devouring people.