Spectator competition winners: monstrous short stories

Your latest challenge, inspired by Joan Didion’s wonderful essay of that title, was to write a short story with the last line ‘I can’t get that monster out of my mind’. Another notable American female essayist, Susan Sontag, has come in for a bit of stick in these pages over the past few weeks, and she popped up again, in Hugh King’s short story: ‘Susan Sontag, naked, terrifying, had come to him in the night, pinned him down with hawser-like arms, and demanded to know his views on post-structuralism.’ Other memorable ‘monsters’ included Beowulf, the Minotaur and Jacob Rees-Mogg. The winners earn £25 each.

Frank Upton It seemed that I passed through a gloomy cathedral and into a chamber of oppressive noise; and in that chamber was a beast with six hundred heads. The heads shouted, crowed, groaned and jeered, now one, now many together; for the heads were divided against each other, and subdivided.