by Timothy K. Beal
ISBN: 0415925886
This book is divided into two parts. The first half deals with monsters in religious texts — mainly the biblical stories about Behemoth and Leviathan, and their cultural antecedents. The second half is more concerned about monsters (Dracula, Frankenstein, Lovecraft’s Cthulu) and their religious/spiritual implications.
Beal clearly loves what he is writing about. He knows what he is talking about, and he is more caught up in the excitement of exploring monsters than he is in sounding like an Important Academic. He occasionally gets a bit too invested in what seems to me like repetitive minutiae in his zeal, but that could just be because I wanted to hear more about different monsters.
This book is not meant as a compedium of monsters: Beal is more interested in the ideas generated by the appearance of monsters than he is in individual incarnations. He writes about the part chaos monsters play in theology, instead of writing about every strange beastie that might show up in the Bible. He looks at how Dracula plays into a sociocultural and religious framework instead of tracking down multiple supernatural creatures. I found his arguments compelling. His real question is “what do monsters mean?” and he spends this book laying out the answers as he sees them.
If you have an interest in monsters or in horror that goes deeper than B-movies, you will probably be interested in this book. I’ve never read Stoker’s Dracula or any of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories (both of which
Beal talks about) and now I think I will. Recommended.
