Book description
The human mind needs monsters. In every culture and in every epoch in
human history, from ancient Egypt to modern Hollywood, imaginary
beings have haunted dreams and fantasies, provoking in young and old
shivers of delight, thrills of terror, and endless fascination. All
known folklores brim with visions of looming and ferocious monsters,
often in the role as adversaries to great heroes. But while heroes
have been closely studied by mythologists, monsters have been
neglected, even though they are equally important as pan-human symbols
and reveal similar insights into ways the mind works. In Monsters:
Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary
Terrors, anthropologist David D. Gilmore explores what human
traits monsters represent and why they are so ubiquitous in people's
imaginations and share so many features across different cultures.
Using colorful and absorbing evidence from virtually all times
and places, Monsters is the first attempt by an anthropologist
to delve into the mysterious, frightful abyss of mythical beasts and
to interpret their role in the psyche and in society. After many
hair-raising descriptions of monstrous beings in art, folktales,
fantasy, literature, and community ritual, including such avatars as
Dracula and Frankenstein, Hollywood ghouls, and extraterrestrials,
Gilmore identifies many common denominators and proposes some novel interpretations.
Monsters, according to Gilmore, are always enormous, man-eating,
gratuitously violent, aggressive, sexually sadistic, and superhuman in
power, combining our worst nightmares and our most urgent fantasies.
We both abhor and worship our monsters: they are our gods as well as
our demons. Gilmore argues that the immortal monster of the mind is a
complex creation embodying virtually all of the inner conflicts that
make us human. Far from being something alien, nonhuman, and outside
us, our monsters are our deepest selves.
"Gilmore's . . . engaging book suggests a universal need to
extend perceptions of evil far beyond the obvious."-Choice
David D. Gilmore is Professor of Anthropology at the State University
of New York, Stony Brook. He is the author of several books, including
Misogyny: The Male Malady, also available from the University of
Pennsylvania Press.
