Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors [Hardcover]

David D. Gilmore (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 11, 2002 | ISBN-10: 0812237021 | ISBN-13: 978-0812237023

The human mind needs monsters. In every culture and in every epoch in human history, from ancient Egypt to modern Hollywood, imaginary beings have haunted dreams and fantasies, provoking in young and old shivers of delight, thrills of terror, and endless fascination. All known folklores brim with visions of looming and ferocious monsters, often in the role as adversaries to great heroes. But while heroes have been closely studied by mythologists, monsters have been neglected, even though they are equally important as pan-human symbols and reveal similar insights into ways the mind works. In Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors, anthropologist David D. Gilmore explores what human traits monsters represent and why they are so ubiquitous in people's imaginations and share so many features across different cultures.

Using colorful and absorbing evidence from virtually all times and places, Monsters is the first attempt by an anthropologist to delve into the mysterious, frightful abyss of mythical beasts and to interpret their role in the psyche and in society. After many hair-raising descriptions of monstrous beings in art, folktales, fantasy, literature, and community ritual, including such avatars as Dracula and Frankenstein, Hollywood ghouls, and extraterrestrials, Gilmore identifies many common denominators and proposes some novel interpretations.

Monsters, according to Gilmore, are always enormous, man-eating, gratuitously violent, aggressive, sexually sadistic, and superhuman in power, combining our worst nightmares and our most urgent fantasies. We both abhor and worship our monsters: they are our gods as well as our demons. Gilmore argues that the immortal monster of the mind is a complex creation embodying virtually all of the inner conflicts that make us human. Far from being something alien, nonhuman, and outside us, our monsters are our deepest selves.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Gilmore's . . . engaging book suggests a universal need to extend perceptions of evil far beyond the obvious."—Choice

About the Author

David D. Gilmore is Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. He is the author of several books, including Misogyny: The Male Malady, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press (October 11, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812237021
• ISBN-13: 978-0812237023
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,197,395 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Monster of a Thousand Mouths, February 11, 2005

By 

Zack Davisson "japanreviewed" (Seattle, WA, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors (Hardcover)

Joseph Campbell gave much attention to the universal nature of folk heroes in his seminal "Hero of a Thousand Faces." He advanced the idea of the monomyth, a fundamental story told time and time again in every culture. Gilmore, in "Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors" seeks to continue Campbell's thinking, this time examining the monsters which heroes are pitted against in these monomyths.

Gilmore is no Campbell, however, and what was a life's work to Campbell is just a one-time, although enthusiastic, book for Gilmore. He does assemble a fair argument on a universal monster; Larger than normal in size, Human eating, combining the traits of several animals into a single creature. It is true that most monsters fit this general description, and he gives us a good picture of the fundamental fear of the human mind. The main case studies in "Monster" are the North American Wendigo and the Spanish and French Tarasque. These get an in-depth study, while much of the rest of the book is a tour through monsters of the world, in cultures as diverse as Japan, China and East Asia, the United States, Europe and the Hopi of North America.

More interesting than the shared form is how this "Mono-monster" is viewed in the various cultures, sometimes feared, sometimes worshiped, sometimes accepted with neutrality. While all cultures give breed to something similar in shape and temperament, they do not all respond to the beast in the same manner, according to Gilmore's research. There is clearly room here for further study, and "Monsters" is ultimately wide but not deep.

Perhaps the area covered is a bit too wide for such a slim book, as there are a few factual errors that creep in. I recognized a few glaring errors in the chapters on Japan, which is my own particular area of expertise. For instance, he says that the Edo period preceded the "modern Tokugawa period." In fact, the Tokugawa era is a medieval period, and Edo was succeeded by Meji, when Japan modernized. While this kind of slip may have little impact on his overall ideas, it does bring into question the accuracy of his other statements.

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Good, but hard to trust, March 9, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors (Hardcover)

The author obviously loves the work he is doing, however he seems to have had very little first hand experience with the sources he uses. IOW, he quotes what others have said about the myths of given cultures rather than doing the research and actually reading these himself.

Further, the book is muddle by typos and just plain bad information. This abounds for the material dealing with the ancient world, but seems to abate as one moves closer to the present.

In summary, his theories are interesting, his methodolgy is intriguing, his actual descriptions of monsters are sometimes completely off. Read it with care.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Things That Go Bump in the Mind, September 13, 2003

By 

William Holmes "semloh2287" (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors (Hardcover)

Gilmore's "Monsters" is a little hard to describe, but it's enjoyable. In some respects, it is a dry academic book straight from a university press. There is the inevitable chapter that offers a Freudian explanation for our vision of monsters, as well as the occasional Teutonic sentence that would be more at home in a turgid article than in an otherwise entertaining book.

You can breeze through the drier material (unless you revel in that sort of thing) and take advantage of the fact that Gilmore clearly loves his subject. He energetically surveys stories of monsters from cultures all over the world, and he finds in these tales a deep commonality: monsters are always large, evil, physically grotesque, and determined to eat as many people as they can catch. Such creatures are usually a bizarre mix of human and animal, and they are often divine or related in some way to the people on whom they prey. In these stories, there is frequently a hero, himself superhuman and somewhat frightening, who is able to kill the local monster for the benefit of the community.

Readers who expect to find a tale of "cryptozoology"--of the physical search for legendary monsters like Bigfoot, Yeti and the Loch Ness serpent--will probably be disappointed. Gilmore's monsters live in the landscape of the mind, and they will never be found in the forests and mountains of the physical world. Still, Gilmore's journey through the imaginations of many cultures is conducted with enthusiasm and vigor, and it is this quality that makes "Monsters" fun to read.