Monsters and Monstrosity from the Fin de Siècle to the Millennium

Zombies, vampires and ghosts feature prominently in nearly all forms of entertainment in the 21st century, including popular fiction, film, comics, television and computer games. But these creatures have been vital to the entertainment industry since the best-seller books of a century and half ago. Monsters don’t just invade popular culture, they help sell popular culture.
This collection of new essays covers 150 years of enduringly popular Gothic monsters who have shocked and horrified audiences in literature, film and comics. The contributors unearth forgotten monsters and reconsider familiar ones, examining the audience taboos and fears they embody.

Sharla Hutchison, a professor of English at Fort Hays State University, has authored critical articles on Gothic fiction, modern literature, and women writers.

Rebecca A. Brown teaches composition and developmental English in Seattle. Her current and forthcoming publications focus on children in horror films and monsters in picturebooks.

Edited by Sharla Hutchison and Rebecca A. Brown

Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 260
Bibliographic Info: 14 photos, notes, bibliographies, index
Copyright Date: 2015
pISBN: 978-0-7864-9506-1
eISBN: 978-1-4766-2271-2
Imprint: McFarland

Acknowledgments v
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: Ishirô 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

About the Contributors 245
Index 247

• “with this collection, Hutchison and Brown break new ground in monster studies…informed and sophisticated use of postmodern critical approaches…recommended”—Choice
• “the essays assess a century and a half of such content across a variety of media-literature, film, and comics”—Communications Booknotes Quarterly