I feel that monsters are here in our world to help us understand it. They are an essential part of a fable.”
~ Guillermo del Toro
Monsters have been part of human storytelling from the very beginning. Mythology, religion, and folklore from all over the world; ancient epics like Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Nibelungenlied, and The Odyssey; old stories like those gathered in One Thousand and One Nights; all of them are teeming with monsters are terrifying, thrilling, powerful, bestial, magical, and alluring—often, all those things at once.
It says something about our love for monsters that even the oldest monster tales still hold our interest. Beowulf, for example, is a thrill to read, and while I first experienced the full text in Seamus Heaney’s translation, I highly recommend Maria Dahvana Hedley’s 2020 translation for its bold-as-brass take on the text:
I may have bathed in the blood of beasts,
netted five foul ogres at once, smashed my way into a troll den
and come out swinging, gone skinny-dipping in a sleeping sea
and made sashimi of some sea monsters.
Anyone who fucks with the Geats? Bro, they have to fuck with me.
The late 19th and early 20th century brought us monsters that keep turning up in new incarnations in fiction, movies, and video games. The vampires of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Sheridan La Fanu’s Carmilla, the werewolves of Clemence Housman’s The Were-wolf and Guy Endore’s The Werewolf of Paris; the monster cobbled together from body parts, electricity, and hubris in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the invading alien monsters of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds; and man, turning himself monstrous through science, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
While it was published in 1979, decades later than the previously mentioned books, I think Angela Carter’s short story collection The Bloody Chamber should be added to this list of Gothic monster classics. The stories in the collection are all based on fairytales and folktales, including the title story which is a masterful retelling of Bluebeard. Carter also delves deep into all sorts of monstrously wolfish delights in her reworkings of Little Red Riding Hood, “The Werewolf,” “The Company of Wolves,” and “Wolf-Alice.” Carter’s monsters are usually both bestial and alluring, and the same is certainly true for many other monsters, including the vampires in Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire (now adapted into a hot hot hot new TV-series). It’s no secret that monsters can be sexy. Check out A.V. Greene’s short story “The Monster Fucker Club” in Apex for one recent, terrific take on that subject.
“I’m always looking for the monster. Not even just in horror. I want them in everything. Just give me the monsters. Logical conclusions don’t satisfy. Monsters satisfy, absolutely.”
~Victor LaValle
Beyond the monster classics, there are plenty of new monster stories to go around as well. Some of my favorites from recent years include the epic, intricately woven fantasy series Monstress by Marjorie Liu & Sana Takeda, The Changeling by Victor LaValle (which puts some truly old-school monsters right in the middle of New York City), the compelling horrors of What Feasts at Night and What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher, and Cadwell Turnbull’s politically charged, monster-driven, multiverse epic No Gods, No Monsters and its sequel, We Are the Crisis. If you’re into werewolves (I am, if you haven’t noticed), I recommend the one-two punch of Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones and The Devourers by Indrapramit Das. Two deeply engaging and very different takes on werewolves and werewolf lore, one set in present-day United States, the other a sprawling tale of love and transformation that spans centuries and continents.
If you’re hungry for some brand-new monster books, there’s already a lot of 2024 fiction to dig into, including these six titles:
Exordia by Seth Dickinson
What do you do when you meet an alien in Central Park?
It coils up in the sunlight, fanged and beautiful, eating the turtles who live on the rocks. It tears them in half and plucks the meat from their shells with white-glove hands. There are red stains on its fingertips. It has eight heads and eight necks like adders. Anna stares at it in delight.
Exordia is the story of Ssrin, a multi-headed, snake-like alien so evil that most people can’t even deal with being in her presence. Ssrin comes to Earth, fleeing her own kind, and hooks up with Anna, a Kurdish woman who survived enough trauma and war to fuel a universe of nightmares. It starts out something like Venom, with Anna and Ssrin living cheek-by-jowls in Anna’s apartment in New York City, and it ends in Kurdistan, with what is perhaps the most all-out, balls-to-the wall, over-the-top fight for Earth I’ve ever seen on the page, but it’s truly the relationship between Ssrin and Anna that is the heart and (evil?) soul of the story.
The Last Phi Hunter, by Salinee Goldenberg
Most other hunters only cared what the phi did in their current state. It was hard to pity a monster when a mother recounted the loss of her child or a demon whose belly bulged with human bones. But the pret, Ex could feel bad for them.
Goldenberg’s fantasy novel is filled with monstrous spirits rooted in Thai culture and folklore (like the krasue and the pret). It’s also infused with a strong Buddhist perspective on monsters and ghosts, reincarnation, karma, punishment, and the afterlife. We follow Ex, a young phi hunter, trained by the Phi Hunters Order to hunt down and kill the phi, AKA the hungry ghosts, AKA the reincarnated souls of humans whose past sins have caused them to come back in cursed, monstrous forms. Like in Exordia, the connection between human and monster is one of the strongest parts of the book as Ex’s growing empathy and connection with the monsters he has been trained to hunt changes his perspective.
Someone You Can Build a Nest In, by John Wiswell
If Shesheshen ever went near those flocks, droves of human guards would descend on her. Meanwhile townsfolk wore the wool while eating those very animals.
And somehow Shesheshen was the monster.
Had she ever worn a human while she ate them?
If you’re looking for a different kind of monster story, Wiswell has you covered. Like The Last Phi Hunter, this book deals with monsters and monster hunters, but this fantasy romance is told from the perspective of Shesheshen, a monster who falls in love with one of those hunters. Shesheshen is a shapeshifter and usually lives happily as an amorphous lump in her nest, but when she is attacked in her home, she builds herself a body from various leftover limbs and items from past meals. Once she’s out in the world, she has to contend with the monstrosity of humans and even—shudder—in-laws.
The West Passage, by Jared Pechaček
The Beast could look like anything when it came; the one who fought it had to be equally adaptable.
This phantasmagorical wonder of a book is full of monsters, shapeshifting and magic, and the entire tale, from its start in the Grey Tower, through a strange journey and quest in an even stranger realm, to the fateful confrontation at the end, is haunted by the specter of a monster known as the Beast. The Beast always rises; and the Guardian of the West Passage must always fight it. Pechaček writes a world that is full of monsters and monstrous beings, none of them more frightening perhaps than the mysterious, and seriously powerful, giant ladies who rule the towers of the realm.
The Garden of Delights, by Amal Singh
“What if I want to defeat monsters?” asks the girl confidently. Once again, her eyes blaze, and command respect. — The Caretaker can tell she will defeat a monster someday. And it will be easy for her.
Singh’s lush fantasy novel is set in the city of Sirvassa, “where petals are currency and flowers are magic” and where the Caretaker of the Garden of Delights creates magical potions, “delights,” from flowers. Not very monstrous, you might think, but this is also very much a story of monsters, beginning with the mysterious winged creature that tries to attack the city from above. There is also another monster at the heart of this tale, and Singh captures the origins of that particular beast with subtly nuanced insight, describing both the thrill and the dread of becoming a monster, capable of terrible things, but also capable of wielding teeth and claws against your enemies.
The Eyes are the Best Part, by Monika Kim
“I stare at my reflection in the graffitied mirror, expecting to see a monster, a demon, a killer, but it’s me. Just me.”
There are no supernatural or extraterrestrial monsters in this psychological horror novel. Instead, we follow the profoundly unsettling, but also rather glorious, transformation of Ji-won from frustrated, stressed out Korean-American college student, into a predator with a craving for eyeballs. While this is a completely different kind of story than The Garden of Delights, the books share some similarities in their depiction of how a person might choose to embrace the monstrous in order to fight back in an unjust world. With razor sharp precision, Kim captures the way Ji-won’s psyche fractures under the increasingly unbearable pressures of everyday indignities—failing grades, poverty, her parent’s divorce, the stifling presence of her mom’s loathsome new boyfriend, fetishization, misogyny, racism. Even when Ji-won goes off the rails in quite spectacular fashion, I understood her choice to become monstrous.
I think Grendel’s mother, another monstrous woman, “ferocious, tenacious, rapacious” (in Hedley’s Beowulf translation)would have understood her too.
That’s why I embrace monsters, because monsters are ultimately the patron saints of otherness—everything people say should not be.
~ Guillermo del Toro
