Here are 90 books that Monster Theory fans have personally recommended if you like
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What could possibly captivate the mind more than monsters? As a kid, I eagerly consumed books from authors like R.L. Stine, Stephen King, and HP Lovecraft. I watched George Romero, Wes Craven, and John Carpenter, and played games like Dungeons and Dragons, Vampire: The Masquerade, andThe Call of Cthulhu.When I discovered monster studies in my PhD years—a way to read monsters as cultural productions that tell us something about the people that create them—I was hooked. Ever since, I get to continue reading my favorite books, watching my favorite movies, and playing my favorite games. It’s just that now someone’s paying me to do it.
Cohen is a necessary starting point, but the contributions to Monsters and the Monstrousreally highlight how far monster studies came in the first couple of decades it was around. The contributions in this volume range farther than the Western world, touching on topics in Africa, the Caribbean, Japan, and a host of others. There is also additional theory to account for shifts in time and culture when thinking about the monstrous and contributions from powerhouses in the field like Debra Higgs Strickland, Debbie Felton, and Michael Dylan Foster. I have personally found Six and Thompson’s article “From Hideous to Hedonist” to be useful every time I teach my course on Religion and the Monstrous.
The field of monster studies has grown significantly over the past few years and this companion provides a comprehensive guide to the study of monsters and the monstrous from historical, regional and thematic perspectives. The collection reflects the truly multi-disciplinary nature of monster studies, bringing in scholars from literature, art history, religious studies, history, classics, and cultural and media studies. The companion will offer scholars and graduate students the first comprehensive and authoritative review of this emergent field.
What could possibly captivate the mind more than monsters? As a kid, I eagerly consumed books from authors like R.L. Stine, Stephen King, and HP Lovecraft. I watched George Romero, Wes Craven, and John Carpenter, and played games like Dungeons and Dragons, Vampire: The Masquerade, andThe Call of Cthulhu.When I discovered monster studies in my PhD years—a way to read monsters as cultural productions that tell us something about the people that create them—I was hooked. Ever since, I get to continue reading my favorite books, watching my favorite movies, and playing my favorite games. It’s just that now someone’s paying me to do it.
Ok, you’ve read Cohen and Monsters and the Monstrous. This monster stuff is getting pretty good, and you might be able to feel around the edges a bit. How does it apply to contemporary America which “no longer believes in monsters?” This is where Poole’s book comes in. Poole walks through monstrosity in the US from Columbus’ first steps to just shy of 2020. All the juicy topics that Americans have used monsters for—sex, race, and politics—emerge in this monstrous tour de forceof US history. This is one of the first books I recommend to my students.
Monsters arrived in 2011aand now they are back. Not only do they continue to live in our midst, but, as historian Scott Poole shows, these monsters are an important part of our pastaa hideous obsession America cannot seem to escape. Poole's central argument in Monsters in America is that monster tales intertwine with America's troubled history of racism, politics, class struggle, and gender inequality. The second edition of Monsters leads readers deeper into America's tangled past to show how monsters continue to haunt contemporary American ideology. By adding new discussions of the American West, Poole focuses intently on the Native…
What could possibly captivate the mind more than monsters? As a kid, I eagerly consumed books from authors like R.L. Stine, Stephen King, and HP Lovecraft. I watched George Romero, Wes Craven, and John Carpenter, and played games like Dungeons and Dragons, Vampire: The Masquerade, andThe Call of Cthulhu.When I discovered monster studies in my PhD years—a way to read monsters as cultural productions that tell us something about the people that create them—I was hooked. Ever since, I get to continue reading my favorite books, watching my favorite movies, and playing my favorite games. It’s just that now someone’s paying me to do it.
Part theory, part media analysis, and all awesome, Nelson’s work traces the rise of the “Protestant Gothic” tradition in the United States and the way in which this dark and gloomy literary tradition came to inform most of the media we consume today. From zombies to vampires, HP Lovecraft to Guillermo del Toro, Nelson reveals the ways that the Protestant Gothic has shaped modern literature, television, and film into a space of religious imagining that we don’t even recognize.
The Gothic, Romanticism's gritty older sibling, has flourished in myriad permutations since the eighteenth century. In Gothicka, Victoria Nelson identifies the revolutionary turn it has taken in the twenty-first. Today's Gothic has fashioned its monsters into heroes and its devils into angels. It is actively reviving supernaturalism in popular culture, not as an evil dimension divorced from ordinary human existence but as part of our daily lives.
To explain this millennial shift away from the traditionally dark Protestant post-Enlightenment Gothic, Nelson studies the complex arena of contemporary Gothic subgenres that take the form of novels, films, and graphic novels. She…
I grew up religious but loving scary things—horror movies, scary comic books, Dark Shadows, andThe Twilight Zone. Even the music of Alice Cooper. While I’m no longer religious, I have a doctorate in religious studies and I still have a fascination with media that cause fear. I also write horror stories. BeyondHoly HorrorI have written two more books on religion and horror and I read every book about this odd combination as soon as I can get my hands on it. I believe you should never judge people by their tastes in media—they can be decent folk even if they like horror.
Religion and Its Monsters started this whole conversation.
Timothy Beal successfully transitioned from an author of academic books to an author of trade books, and this one shows how he did it. He selected two unexpectedly compatible subjects and demonstrated that they lurk in the same mental spaces.
I was inspired by this book to allow myself to reclaim my childhood interest in monsters as an adult. If serious scholars wrote about such things, why shouldn’t I read about them?
Unfortunately, Beal never followed up with another book on the topic.
Religion's great and powerful mystery fascinates us, but it also terrifies. So too the monsters that haunt the stories of the Judeo-Christian mythos and earlier traditions: Leviathan, Behemoth, dragons, and other beasts. In this unusual and provocative book, Timothy K. Beal writes about the monsters that lurk in our religious texts, and about how monsters and religion are deeply entwined. Horror and faith are inextricable. Ans as monsters are part of religious texts and traditions, so religion lurks in the modern horror genre, from its birth in Dante's Inferno to the contemporary spookiness of H.P. Lovecraft and the Hellraiser films.…
I saw my first Godzilla movie when I was seven years old, and I immediately fell in love: what kid doesn’t want to be a giant radioactive monster with attitude? But unlike baseball cards, I never outgrew Godzilla and, over the decades, came to appreciate the cultural significance of one of the world’s most enduring film icons. In my writing on Godzilla, I explore my own fascination with monsters and contemplate why all societies, from the dawn of time to today, have compulsively created imaginary creatures that terrify them. The books on this list have helped me understand the human obsession with monsters, and I hope you will find them equally enlightening and enjoyable.
I was fascinated by yokai, the weird and wonderful creatures of Japanese folklore, well before they became a thing on social media and in global pop culture. Of all the books designed to introduce yokai to Western audiences, Michael Dylan Foster's is by far the best at explaining how the Japanese understand these legendary creatures and their roles in Japanese culture throughout history.
His stories of kappa and oni and monstrous umbrellas with arms and legs are hilarious, creepy, unforgettable, instructive, and revealing. If I have one gripe about this book, it is that Foster dismisses Godzilla and other kaiju as not being yokai. He’s wrong, but everyone deserves one mistake, especially in an otherwise excellent book.
Monsters, ghosts, fantastic beings, and supernatural phenomena of all sorts haunt the folklore and popular culture of Japan. Broadly labeled yokai, these creatures come in infinite shapes and sizes, from tengu mountain goblins and kappa water spirits to shape-shifting foxes and long-tongued ceiling-lickers. Currently popular in anime, manga, film, and computer games, many yokai originated in local legends, folktales, and regional ghost stories. Drawing on years of research in Japan, Michael Dylan Foster unpacks the history and cultural context of yokai, tracing their roots, interpreting their meanings, and introducing people who have hunted them through the ages. In this delightful…
I saw my first Godzilla movie when I was seven years old, and I immediately fell in love: what kid doesn’t want to be a giant radioactive monster with attitude? But unlike baseball cards, I never outgrew Godzilla and, over the decades, came to appreciate the cultural significance of one of the world’s most enduring film icons. In my writing on Godzilla, I explore my own fascination with monsters and contemplate why all societies, from the dawn of time to today, have compulsively created imaginary creatures that terrify them. The books on this list have helped me understand the human obsession with monsters, and I hope you will find them equally enlightening and enjoyable.
Who cannot love a serious but accessible book that obsesses about things like Pokémon, the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and Tamagotchi (those annoying and addictive “digital pets” that were a millennial fad)?
Anne Allison’s volume was a real eye-opener for me on the place of monsters in youth culture, as a form of play, and how monsters have been commercialized and globalized over the past half century. It is incredible that, in the early twenty-first century, American kids were more likely to embrace Pikachu and Godzilla than the archetypal monsters of Western culture like Dracula and Frankenstein. Allison helped me understand why Japanese monsters are now conquering the globe.
From sushi and karaoke to martial arts and technoware, the currency of made-in-Japan cultural goods has skyrocketed in the global marketplace during the past decade. The globalization of Japanese "cool" is led by youth products: video games, manga (comic books), anime (animation), and cute characters that have fostered kid crazes from Hong Kong to Canada. Examining the crossover traffic between Japan and the United States, Millennial Monsters explores the global popularity of Japanese youth goods today while it questions the make-up of the fantasies and the capitalistic conditions of the play involved. Arguing that part of the appeal of such…
I saw my first Godzilla movie when I was seven years old, and I immediately fell in love: what kid doesn’t want to be a giant radioactive monster with attitude? But unlike baseball cards, I never outgrew Godzilla and, over the decades, came to appreciate the cultural significance of one of the world’s most enduring film icons. In my writing on Godzilla, I explore my own fascination with monsters and contemplate why all societies, from the dawn of time to today, have compulsively created imaginary creatures that terrify them. The books on this list have helped me understand the human obsession with monsters, and I hope you will find them equally enlightening and enjoyable.
Dinosaurs are the gateway drug to kaiju: most Godzilla fans began as kids fascinated by T-rexes and brontosauruses. I was blown away when I discovered W.J.T. Mitchell’s wonky, geeky, and wonderfully eccentric exploration of why we love dinosaurs, actual monsters (albeit prehistoric ones we can only experience today as skeletons in museums) rather than monsters conjured from our darkest imaginations.
Mitchell’s book is lots of fun to dip into, like a jarful of monstrous candy, but reveals in wonderful detail how dinosaurs (just like the creatures of folklore or fiction) are blank slates onto which a culture’s anxieties and aspirations can be inscribed.
This text addresses the question of how dinosaurs moved from natural extinction to pop culture resurrection, exploring the animal's place in our lives and the source of its popular appeal. In tracing the cultural family tree of the dinosaur there is discovered a creature of striking flexibility, linked to dragons and mammoths, skyscrapers and steam engines, cowboys and Indians. Here the dinosaur becomes a cultural symbol whose plurality of meaning and often contradictory nature is emblematic of modern society itself. As a scientific entity, the dinosaur endured a near-eclipse for over a century, but as an image it is enjoying…
I saw my first Godzilla movie when I was seven years old, and I immediately fell in love: what kid doesn’t want to be a giant radioactive monster with attitude? But unlike baseball cards, I never outgrew Godzilla and, over the decades, came to appreciate the cultural significance of one of the world’s most enduring film icons. In my writing on Godzilla, I explore my own fascination with monsters and contemplate why all societies, from the dawn of time to today, have compulsively created imaginary creatures that terrify them. The books on this list have helped me understand the human obsession with monsters, and I hope you will find them equally enlightening and enjoyable.
I have never been that interested in cryptids, although few words bring a smile to my face as quickly as “Bigfoot” or “Yeti.” I found Eric Cheezum’s Chessie a great read because it takes cryptids seriously, not (of course) as actual, yet-to-be-documented creatures, but as media manifestations of more profound cultural and social transformations, ruptures and yearnings.
Cheezum’s insight into cryptids impressed upon me that the folkloric creation of monsters occurred not just in some distant European past but even in Virginia retirement homes in the 1970s. The book also reminded me that monsters can be as “real” as one imagines. The next time I drive by the Chesapeake Bay, I’ll be looking for Chessie!
The incredible true story of the mysterious sea creature who captured hearts and imaginations during the turbulent 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
In the summer of 1978, residents along the Virginia side of the Potomac River were startled by sightings of a strange creature lurking in the water. Eventually dubbed Chessie, this elusive sea serpent tantalized reporters and the public alike, always slipping away just out of reach. In this, the first comprehensive history of the Chessie phenomenon, Eric A. Cheezum takes us on a thrilling journey through the life and times of the famous monster, diving beneath the surface to…
I never outgrew the curiosity of wanting to know more about the things we fear. Plenty of monsters are just neat! But the more you learn about them, whether they’re animals like bears and sharks or figures of myth like werewolves and dragons, the more interesting they become. I wanted to take audiences deep inside a skin unlike their own so they could understand how it feels to be cast out and how much a monster might look down on us. Because the more you look at monsters, the more you recognize us in them.
One of the classic novels about monsters having internal lives. Grendel doesn’t even survive the first half of the Beowulf poem.
But what was his life like? This creature who went into rages over music and merriment? This outsider who clearly had no one to commune with? Where there could just be pathos, Gardner injects surprising dorkiness and humor that further round out Grendel’s existence. And there’s a huge bonus in the poem’s dragon also showing up as an utter weirdo neighbor.
This classic and much lauded retelling of Beowulf follows the monster Grendel as he learns about humans and fights the war at the center of the Anglo Saxon classic epic.
"An extraordinary achievement."—New York Times
The first and most terrifying monster in English literature, from the great early epic Beowulf, tells his own side of the story in this frequently banned book. This is the novel William Gass called "one of the finest of our contemporary fictions."
I have been fascinated with travel and adventure stories since I read The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton. I finished a whole Walter Scott book; with a dictionary balanced on one knee because Jeanie Deans decides to walk from Edinburgh to London. Romance? Bah! Humbug! I’d rather journey into The Heart of Darkness, follow the hobbits to Mount Doom, or ride a sandworm with Paul Atreides. Show me a lone traveler thrown into the middle of an unfamiliar, confusing culture and you have my full attention. Naturally, when I started typing out my first manuscript, it just had to be a fantasy adventure about an Iban headhunter.
This book is a re-interpretation of the epic saga of Beowulf, re-imagining him as a real-life hero who fought in a historical human world. The magic of this story is that it is hard to tell where facts end and story begins. Ahmad, the narrator, is opinionated in a dry and pedagogic way. He complains about many things but, like a true traveler, refuses little. Even though he regales us with his sense of superiority, his outward manner is meek and passive which helps him get along with the Northmen. Please don’t read this book in a public library if you do not want to be shush-ed. Some of Ahmad’s commentaries on Viking life have sent me into loud, sudden guffaws.
The Eaters of the Dead is a brilliant, stirring tale of historical adventure which deserves a place on readers bookshelves alongside Michael Crichton's bestselling techno-thrillers.
It is AD922 and Ibn Fadlan is sent north from Baghdad as a peaceful ambassador. But before he reaches his destination, he falls in with some Vikings and when they are attacked by mystical bloodthirsty creatures in the midst of a terrible fog, he reluctantly agrees to become the prophesied 13th warrior in order for them to survive.
Later turned into a major Hollywood film, Eaters of the Dead is an imaginative and breathlessly exciting…
