Humans
A Monstrous History
Monsters are blurry beings—out-of-focus, liminal creatures between two categories. Bigfoot is man and ape, a category-breaking bipedal primate. Werewolves are shape-shifters between humans and wolves. Frankenstein’s monster exists somewhere between life and death, animate and inanimate. Mermaids are a hybrid of fish and human, occupying the space between land and water. Such monsters are more human than not, yet not fully human.
We may dismiss monsters as fictional fabrications used to sell pulp magazines and tacky movies. But monsters are more than meaningless fantasy. Beyond fright and amusement, monsters can help us understand the world around us by making us think about our categories and distinctions, our lines and borders. The word monster shares a common etymology with words such as monument and admonish. In a way, monsters are monuments that admonish us to question the ways in which we misplace boundaries.
In Humans: A Monstrous History, British historian Surekha Davies offers a scholarly exploration of monsters and monster-making through the ages—from Minotaurs to Muppets, dwarfs to dragons. As she describes it, the book is not so much a history of monsters as a history through monsters. She deftly problematizes simplistic and dismissive views of so-called monsters and reveals the culpability of monster-makers who name others as monsters. Ultimately, rather than interrogating monsters she aims to interrogate the monster-makers. “There are no monsters, but all of them are real,” she writes. “Monsters are the work of the imagination.”
