150 Years of Monstrosity (Coming for You Now)

Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Richard Marsh’s The Beetle. Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Parasite. Marie Corelli’s Ziska. Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan. Ishiro Honda’s Matango. William Hope Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night.” Angela Carter’s “The Lady of the House of Love.” Richard Laymon’s The Traveling Vampire Show. Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God and Blood Merdian. Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching. H.P. Lovecraft in Comics. Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man. Srdjan Spasojevic’s A Serbian Film.

Sharla Hutchison and Rebecca A. Brown edited MONSTERS AND MONSTROSITY FROM THE FIN DE SIECLE TO THE MILLENNIUM, a collection of essays that discusses all of these works, essential if you want to be in the know about modern horror.

I wrote the essay on A Serbian Film, generally considered by people in the know to be among the ugliest films ever made.

Go on. Feed your head. Get the book from the publisher, McFarland, or from Amazon. Give it as a gift. Insist on getting it as a gift.

All of the above. You can never have too many monsters.

Table of Contents

Introduction (Sharla Hutchison and Rebecca A. Brown) 1

Part I: Forgotten Monsters and Social Unrest

• “She has a parasite soul!” The Pathologization of the Gothic Monster as Parasitic Hybrid in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Richard Marsh’s The Beetle and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Parasite (Emilie ­Taylor-Brown ) 12
• Marie Corelli’s Ziska: A Gothic Egyptian Ghost Story (Sharla Hutchison) 29
• The Queer God Pan: Terror and Apocalypse, Reimagined (Mark De Cicco) 49
• Attack of the Mushroom People: Ishiro Honda’s Matango and William Hope Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night” (Anthony Camara) 69

Part II: Monstrous Violations of Private Life

• Through the Eyes of the Monster: Angela Carter’s “The Lady of the House of Love” (Jameela F. Dallis) 92
• Re-Vamping the Early 1960s: Freakish Vampires and Monstrous Teens in Richard Laymon’s The Traveling Vampire Show (Rebecca A. Brown) 111
• Gothic Commodification of the Body and the Modern Literary Serial Killer in Child of God and American Psycho (Christopher Coughlin) 129
• Rocking and Reeling through the Doors of Miscreation: Disequilibrium in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (Susan Poznar) 144

Part III: Millennial Monsters

• “I think I am a monster”: Helen Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching and the Postmodern Gothic (Bianca Tredennick) 168
• “Madness and monstrosity”: Notions of the Gothic and Sublime in Comics Adaptations of H. P. Lovecraft (Rebecca Janicker) 187
• The Monster of Massification: A Serbian Film (L. Andrew Cooper) 206
• “Bears that dance, bears that don’t”: Aggression, Civilization and the Gothic Bear (Julie Wilhelm and Steven J. Zani) 228