Near the end of the book when everything has gone to shit: Everyone is starving, they’ve abandoned the ships, the poisoned canned food has run out, all the other food has run out, a mutiny has killed (so they think) the captain, and the surgeon has been kidnapped by these mutinous cannibals.  Like I said, everything has gone to shit.  Oh yeah, and the monster is still out there, still killing.  (By the end of the book, the monster is almost the least of anyone's worries.  At least when the monster gets you, you go relatively quickly.)

The surgeon says to his cannibal captor: “All this natural misery.  Why do you men have to add to it?  Why does our species  always have to take our full measure of God-given misery and terror and mortality and them make it worse?”  The response is telling and brilliant…the evil men “stared at the surgeon as if he had begun speaking Aramaic.”

This makes me think of 28 Days Later.  Civilization is crumbling, zombies are everywhere, and the real kicker at the end of the movie comes from the army guys.  Humans are, still and again, the dominant evil.  Why doesn’t disaster prompt us to be good to one another?  It certainly makes delicious fodder for the horror genre.  Distrust of one’s fellow man in the face of external terror thickens the stew of horror.  The monster in The Thing: scary.  The fact that the guys can’t cooperate, can’t figure out a rational, methodical plan to fight it cause they’re too busy fighting one another: extra scary.

It reminds me to remember this when working on my own novels…the monster is rarely scarier then the other humans.

On another note, I like that were the monster to be killed, white men would swarm the globe, the arctic would melt, and the polar bears and other arctic animals would die.  When was the monster killed, cause it seems that that is what has happened...

Here is a neat article/review on the book.

And here is an image of the monster I found on DeviantArt.  Good day to you all.