Monsters. Real or imagined, literal or metaphorical, they have
exerted a dread fascination on the human mind for many centuries.
They attract and repel us, intrigue and terrify us, and in the
process reveal something deeply important about the darker recesses
of our collective psyche. Stephen Asma's On Monsters is a
wide-ranging cultural and conceptual history of monsters-how they
have evolved over time, what functions they have served for us, and
what shapes they are likely to take in the future. Asma begins with
a letter from Alexander the Great in 326 B.C. detailing an
encounter in India with an "enormous beast-larger than an
elephantthree ominous horns on its forehead." From there the
monsters come fast and furious-Behemoth and Leviathan, Gog and
Magog, the leopard-bear-lion beast of Revelation, Satan and his
demons, Grendel and Frankenstein, circus freaks and headless
children, right up to the serial killers and terrorists of today
and the post-human cyborgs of tomorrow. Monsters embody our deepest
anxieties and vulnerabilities, Asma argues, but they also symbolize
the mysterious and incoherent territory just beyond the safe
enclosures of rational thought. Exploring philosophical treatises,
theological tracts, newspapers, pamphlets, films, scientific
notebooks, and novels, Asma unpacks traditional monster stories for
the clues they offer about the inner logic of an era's fears and
fascinations. In doing so, he illuminates the many ways monsters
have become repositories for those human qualities that must be
repudiated, externalized, and defeated. Asma suggests that how we
handle monsters reflects how we handle uncertainty, ambiguity,
insecurity. And in a world that is daily becoming less secure and
more ambiguous, he shows how we might learn to better live with
monsters-and thereby avoid becoming one.
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