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Goblins, also known as Demonkind, are the main antagonists of Dean Koontz's 1985 novel Twilight Eyes. An ancient species of monstrous shapeshifters, they exist solely to cause as much human misery as possible. Goblins are universally evil and cruel, and the race as a whole seeks to wipe out all mankind.
Appearance[]
Goblins in their true forms are hideous, disgusting, and only vaguely humanoid, combining mammalian and reptilian features. Their skin is mostly a dull brass color, but is green and cracked around their red eyes. Their heads are canine in general shape, but they have porcine noses and reptile-like fangs in their mouths. Their fingers have an extra knuckle each and end in razor-sharp claws. Goblins also have stumpy tails, which can be used for balance.
In human form, goblins are unremarkable. They cannot be distinguished from real humans by any means, even genetic testing, except by using certain psychic powers.
Behavior[]
Each and every goblin is evil, cruel, and hateful to its core. Their emotional spectrum is limited to fear, hatred, and sadistic gratification, leaving them incapable of love, compassion, or real joy. Goblins can never be reformed or redeemed, as their hatred is literally coded into their genetics.
Goblins enjoy human suffering more than anything else, so much so that Slim MacKenzie believes they literally feed off of it in some way. Goblins are vicious and murderous sadists, seeking out and causing human pain whenever possible. While they take pleasure even in suffering that they are not responsible for, such as the grief at a funeral or disaster scene, they prefer to actively hurt people. Goblins are essentially an entire race of serial killers, murdering out of sheer cruelty and usually torturing their victims beforehand. Solitary goblins infiltrate families and neighborhoods in human guise, killing those around them and disguising the deaths as accidents. In groups, goblins secretly cause disasters or take control of institutions that can give them access to victims, such as orphanages or even whole town governments. Goblins are always careful to disguise their activities so that humans do not notice anything malicious at work, and when passing off a murder as a natural or accidental death is impossible, they will make sure to frame an innocent person.
Despite their evil and lack of empathy, goblins have a functional society of some sort. They have a widespread social network and sometimes appear to settle down in nuclear families. Their leadership structure is unclear, but they seem to defer to the eldest among their kind. Goblins also have a religion of sorts, though it is utterly nihilistic and hateful. They venerate "dark lightning," a representation of the total death caused by nuclear apocalypse. The goblin followers of the dark lightning faith seek to destroy humanity and everything they have created before wiping themselves out in a racial mass suicide, desiring nothing but total oblivion.
Powers and Abilities[]
Goblins' main power is their shapeshifting. Each goblin has two genomes, one human and one goblin, connected by a metamorphic gene. At will, a goblin can transform into its human form or vice versa. Each goblin's human form is unique to itself and is the same sex as its goblin form. A goblin cannot transform into a human of a different sex or change into a copy of another person. A disguised goblin is genetically human and cannot be distinguished from a real human by any scientific means. When killed, goblins automatically change to human form to make sure that an autopsy cannot determine their true nature.
In their true forms, goblins are significantly stronger and tougher than humans, and additionally have deadly teeth and claws. They can also crawl on walls and ceilings much like geckos can. Goblins must change into their true forms to access these abilities, and usually do so only when pressed. A wounded goblin changing into its true form seems to gain a second wind, probably because their injuries are less severe on the goblin body.
A "dead" goblin can reanimate if its body is sufficiently intact. One goblin, despite having no pulse and being buried for two days, reanimated when exposed to air again. The reanimated goblin seemed to be a kind of zombie, since its lungs and heart did not restart and it mostly acted instinctively. A goblin can be prevented from reanimating by decapitating it.
History[]
Creation[]
Goblins are not natural creatures. They were created tens of thousands of years ago by an advanced human civilization that had found itself in a cold war similar to that of the 20th century. Goblins were genetically engineered to get around the threat of mutually assured nuclear destruction by acting as infiltrators and terrorists. As part of this role, they were designed with an inbuilt hatred of human beings. Eventually, the secret of goblin creation got out and multiple nations made them, creating a new standoff.
Goblins became more dangerous and uncontrollable, and eventually their creators tried to destroy them. Some goblins escaped, however, and began to wage war against humanity. While goblins were initially sterile, some mutant goblins developed the ability to reproduce. This development effectively won the war for the goblins, since the new goblins could neither be controlled or detected. After a couple of decades at most, the goblins managed to initiate a nuclear war, destroying human civilization almost completely. The vast majority of both humans and goblins were killed in this conflict.
Modern Activity[]
After thousands of years, humans forgot about their previous civilization and about the goblins. The goblins, though, did not. Since they lived vastly longer than humans, one-thousand and five hundred years or more, far fewer generations passed for goblins than for humans, so goblin memories of the great war stayed fresh. The goblins' origins became a cornerstone of their culture.
Goblins continued to prey on mankind, who had forgotten what they were and where they came from. Human encounters with goblins provided the basis for numerous myths about shapeshifting predatory monsters. Despite this, though, humanity as a whole never regained their lost knowledge about goblins, and by modern times virtually no one knew they existed, save for a few people with psychic abilities that allowed them to detect goblins.
By the 20th century, the freak mutation that had granted goblins the ability to reproduce had begun to wane. The number of viable births fell too low to replace dying goblins, and the goblin species began to die out. The main reaction to this impending extinction was to plan the genocide of all humanity in a nuclear holocaust, followed by a species-wide mass suicide. A major hub of this plan was Yontsdown, Pennsylvania, a small mining town under goblin rule.
The goblin plan for Armageddon was severely disrupted by Slim MacKenzie and Rya Raines, two humans who had been victimized by goblins early in life. Slim and Rya infiltrated the Yontsdown bunker carved into the local mines and blew it up, killing around five hundred goblins working on the project. Afterward, Slim and Rya set out to continue their war on the goblins.