LITTLE RED OWL

LITTLE RED OWL

"He paused in his narrative and looked archly at the children. They were listening intently. He observed with pleasure that they were both pale with excitement and what was pretty certainly distress. 'What do you think happened to Billy and Gwendolyn?' he urged them. 'Go on, tell me what you think happened to them.' 'I know!' Peter said, almost shouting, 'I know! The Little Red Owl Came and got them out!'"

"'I don’t believe it. The Little Red Owl . . . the Little Red Owl isn’t hurt. He’s all right!'”

Margaret St. Clair, The Little Red Owl

HYRA

HYRA

“And under system conditions Hyra increase so slowly that for one to bud off was a real  rarity.”

“The silicious, gelatinous bodies of the Hyra were extremely hard to destroy.”

“The reason it looked so much emptier was that the Hyra —ugh, how he loathed them—he’d never let Alice see how much) were all jammed together at one end, heaped up on one another, like a pile of oozing, pupilless eyes.”

Margaret St. Clair, The Vanderlark

VENUSIAN

 VENUSIAN

“It wasn't only the way they smelled, it was the way they talked. It was sort of gurgling and tongue-tied and it sounded like too much saliva and too few teeth." 

“The people at the door were plump, even for Venusians. The biggest one, the one with six. chins and two stomachs and whose name, was Shallot-s'hu, had brought a fossilized "Dardanor" epiphyte as a friend's gift, and the others had brought presents too. Their manner were lovely, no matter how much the Venusians themselves smelled like fish, and Oona felt herself, begin to warm to them.“

Margaret St. Clair, The Himalaychalet

“A fat Venusian had been comin’ down the steps of the Tashkent Import and Export Exchange.”

Margaret St. Clair, Return Engagement

BOSULA

BOSULA

“Mnathl handed him a nicely-roasted bosula rib. He ate it avidly. He had always thought the bosula was the best of the food animals of Fyhon.”

“When the bone was gnawed clean she passed him, in a folded fresh green leaf, a mixed grill consisting of bits of bosula liver, kidney, tripe, salivary glands, and eyes.”

Margaret St. Clair, Garden Of Evil

“His face, which had turned pale at the Cyniscus' take-off two days before, was by now the pale curded green of a piece of bosula cheese, and his eyes were sunk.”

Margaret St. Clair, Idris’ Pig

“McPherson was drinking pomelo juice and eating a bosula tongue sandwich.”

Margaret St. Clair, The Gardner

“If we can get through to Varro with the Hyra we’ve go, the big bosula groups will make us rich.”

Margaret St. Clair, The Vanderlark

DARKSIDE MERCURIAN HEXAPOD

DARKSIDE MERCURIAN HEXAPOD

“How do you locate them?”

“Oh, we’ve got a darkside Mercurian hexapod. He hates hunting them. Sits down and shivers when he finds a colony. That’s how we know where to dig.”

"His purplish fur was fluffed out like chenille."

"Sometimes he got all six legs off the ground at once."

"That was why everyone on the ship, except Toots (the psychology of darkside hexapods had not been much investigated, but it seemed that their mental abilities were parallel to those of dogs only up to a point, after which they went soaring off into some sort of high, supersensory cloudland), loved hunting them."
Margaret St. Clair, The Pillows

MEEM

MEEM

“Jrar had been holding the restaurant’s meet on his knees, stroking its thick blackish fur absently, and Duncan had said something or other about wondering why seems were so universally popular.”

“The meem poked its flat head out. Its dull eyes looked at him.”

“Picket indicated the meet, which, as inert as a feather stole, was lying on the 

edge of the bunk.”

Margaret St. Clair, Meem

MOCKER

MOCKER

“George’s face slipped down toward the fourth button on his coat. It wavered, solidified, flowed back into place, and then slopped down over his lapels once more.”

“‘It was a Mocker, I think,’ He answered.”

“They’re parasitic -ah- entities, that feed on the life force as well as the flesh, of human beings.”

“For some reason, whenever it leaves its host, it takes on his features and body and dresses itself in his clothes.”

Margaret St. Clair, The Stroller

DIGGER

DIGGER
"The clicking taps were getting louder, and an instant later another of O'Hare's inventions was standing before us."

"I saw a beak like a parrot's, Atlantean shoulders, broad, stubby, almost fingerless hands. It was quite short, not more than three feet tall, and it made an impression of enormous strength."

"'What is it?' I asked in a whisper.'
'A Digger,' she answered in a normal voice. 'You don't have to speak softly here, Sam. It's deaf.'"

Margaret St. Clair, The Dancers Of Noyo

BLUE-HUED THING

BLUE-HUED THING

“There was even a big blue-hued thing that reminded the young man a little of a kangaroo.”

Margaret St. Clair, Garden Of Evil

TATZEL WORM

TATZEL WORM

“An enormous, horrid, ophidian head was rearing over the fiery ramparts. The faceted eyes gleamed red in the firelight, the neck was as thick as a tree trunk. It turned Appy cold to look at it. He’d heard about the horrors of the tatzel worm since he was a fledgling.”

“After a moment the head reappeared, holding Charleen lightly between its dreadfully-toothed jaws.”

Margaret St. Clair, The Hero Comes 

RHODOPS

RHODOPS

“On the way they had to ford two swollen rivers and beat off the attack of a must maddened bull rhodops.”

Margaret St. Clair, Garden Of Evil

GLANNATH

GLANNATH

"'It sure is a mean-looking old thing,' Neenie replied obliquely. 'It looks like the head of a great big baby. Or like a great big, big eye.'"

"Daintily she dropped the cube of meat on the monsters' thin-skinned pink upper surface."

"The big pink thing like the head of an enormous baby, the big pink thing like a six-foot eye -- it was gone."

"It had been nothing but a big old stomach anyway."

"What did you do to the glannanth out in the ash pit?"

Margaret St. Clair, Personal Monster

BIRD PERSON

BIRD PERSON

“Appy squawked. He flapped his wings.”

“I lost one or two feathers getting through the south gate.”

He got a shock that jolted him down to the ends of his tail feathers.

“The few drops of plastic that had landed on it had given its normal olive drab coloring a faintly rotten look.”

“Appy flapped his wings reflectively. He’d never had a screwdriver in his weak little pseudocheir in his life.”

“He thrust the tool into his pouch and waddled off at top speed.”

"What would happen to the bird people's hatching rate now?"

Margaret St. Clair, The Hero Comes 

TALIPYGIAN

TALIPYGIAN

“‘Talypgians?’ I asked.’”

“‘The secondary inhabitants of Iapetus. You can’t photograph them easily, because they’re partly electrical energy, and they’re practically impossible to describe. They look like big maroon hedgehogs, as much as anything, with erectile electric crests over their heads, and lost of white sharp teeth.’”

‘“I’d never realized before what particularly vicious lower jaws they had.’”

“‘The Talipygian flapped his flippers, erected his crest, and said ‘gunk’ a couple of times.’”

Margaret St. Clair, Return Engagement

HIEROPHANT

HIEROPHANT

“The asteroid was a bubble of lava, honeycombed with tunnels like a rotten apple with worm tracks, brittle, dry and dead.”

“From one of the branches someone—something (whatever that radiant shape is, it is certainly not human) is handing them a barely ripened fruit.”

“You were standing there in the lava cave with that white thing coiled all around you, burning you, sucking the life from you.”

“At last they had stopped going altogether and only the hierophants, long-lived, perhaps immortal creatures of pure energy, had remained.”

Margaret St. Clair, The Hierophants

ARTIST FAMILIAR

ARTIST FAMILIAR

“Badly drawn as it was, it had a set of cruelly competent long white teeth.”

“From the dim surface of the water a huge horned head was staring up at him. Sanderson wheeled about with a hoarse cry. At first he did not understand. Trailing behind him in the sooty light were a long, scaly lizardlike tail, two wobbling pipestem legs. And on the back were folded ribbed, repulsive, rusty bat wings. His wings.”

Margaret St. Clair, Counter Charm

INSECT-HUMAN HYBRID

INSECT-HUMAN HYBRID

“The insects whose eggs he’s been using aren’t at all those that were in the soil core the robot rocket brought back. The ones, I mean, that first attracted the biologists’ attention to Ganymede. Those were a sort of scale insect, parasitic on Ganymedean lichens. What Neil’s using now is something more like a sow bug.”

“The first human beings we produce from our artificial egg cells will almost certainly be monsters.”
Margaret St. Clair, Squee

PIG-MAN

PIG-MAN

““Circe,” Willets read in the second paragraph, ‘was an enchantress who lived on an island. She turned people into pigs by giving them drinks with a magic herb in it.’”

“Her green eyes told him the truth. He tried to run, to get out of the room, but he was strangling, lost, drowning in his clothes. "It Was the doughnuts!” he wanted to say, but all that came out was a high squealing grunt. Mrs. Hawk looked down at her new pig. For a moment her detached, polite smile turned into a wide frigid grin of triumph. Then she took the back-scratcher and began to prod Willets toward the slaughterhouse.

Margaret St. Clair, Mrs. Hawk

"And when Odysseus on his wanderings came to her island, Circe, after having changed several of his companions into pigs, became so much attached to the unfortunate hero, that he was induced to remain a whole year with her."

Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology

VULTURE MAN

VULTURE MAN

“They pulled as hard as they could against the ropes the Vulture Man had tied them with, but they could not get loose.”

Margaret St. Clair, The Little Red Owl

LOCHINVAR

LOCHINVAR

“He listened. His round, intelligent eyes were bright with curiosity. After a moment he expanded the frilly lettuce-green crest on the top of his head that was his organ for distance thought perception. He listened with it too, cocking his head thoughtfully from time to time.”

“He put his tiny paws on the edge of the drain hole and levered his limber, celery-stalk body up on the porcelain.”

“He bunched his four neat little paws under him, let his undercurved frondy tail hang down into the sink, and composed himself for a nice nap on the rim of the drainboard.”

““I thought it was some sort of lizard, but it’s shaped more like a sea horse. It doesn’t look dangerous, anyhow.” Lochinvar had opened his agate eyes and was looking at them.”

“Lochinvar ate daintily, partly nibbling, partly licking, like a cat, with his delicate golden tongue.”

“‘Why, he’s covered with fur!” she said, surprised. “That green stuff is as soft as silk.”’

“This woman didn’t realize — and, if he had his way, never would realize — that she and her husband had been harboring one of the fabulous Gryna animals. The Gryna animal’s peculiar mental abilities run like a particolored thread through Martian history.”

Margaret St. Clair, Lochinvar