Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors. By David D. Gilmore. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Pp. xiv + 210, preface, references, index, black/white illustrations and photographs, ISBN 0-8122-3702-1, cloth.)

To paraphrase Chesterton, the follies of folklore’s youth are in retrospect glorious when compared to the follies of our own age. I have, of late, been perusing N.B. Dennys who, in his 1870 work The Folk-Lore of China, was fascinated by how an entire nation could adhere to “puerile systems of superstition” (2). As folklore/ethnology progresses through Boas, through Barbeau, through Dorson, through Lacourcière, through Yoder, through Greenhill, such patronising attitudes, one hopes, can be returned to with a proto-nostalgic pride of how much the science has changed. And then I open David Gilmore’s Monsters. Gilmore, an anthropologist from SUNY Stony Brook whose previous work has included a book on misogyny and one on carnival in Spain, has written a book that is essentially offensive to (since his perspective is purportedly global) everyone. Gilmore begins by setting out what he defines as a monster: “supernatural, mythical, or magical products of the imagination” (6). Being “strict” with his definitions is a result of how “people everywhere use monster ‘glibly’ to describe whatever they find loathsome, terrifying, or dangerous” (6). Metaphorical monsters, like Stalin or Hitler, or people with physical defects who were referred to as monsters in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, he explicitly omits, as he does sorcerers, witches, ghosts, and zombies. Monsters, for Gilmore, are those things which he recognises as monsters: gigantic, human-eating, hybridised creatures which are projections of the greatest of human fears. Gilmore explicitly bases his analysis on “three major theorists: Sigmund Freud, Victor Turner, and Mary Douglas” (16), but much of his approach is also influenced by Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces. In cultural myths, supposedly, heroes are required to defeat monsters, just as monsters are required so that a hero can defeat them. The relationship between hero and monster is believed by Gilmore to be ubiquitous: it is thus made all the more surprising when, in his survey of world monsters, there so often appear monsters without hero. The Ugaritic and Hebrew behemoth and leviathan, for example, have no opposing hero (33-34), and, while “none of the world’s cultures — preindustrial, industrial, or postindustrial — have richer or more diverse monster imagery than Japan” (135), there is no discussion of any Japanese monster-slayers. Much of his theory disappears when it cannot account for something. Although there are certainly traces of Douglas and Turner through the book (specifically in the concluding chapter when he recalls his framework, and, with Turner, when Gilmore bases his treatment of Ndembu ritual entirely on The Forest of Symbols), Freud is the zeitgeist running throughout. The hybridisation is explained as working analogous to the conflation and combination of perceived images into one superimposed structure in dreams; cannibalism, the fear of being eaten, and the unbridled power of the monster are manifestations of the primary sadistic eroticism of the infant; the hero’s defeat of the monster (who is often primordial and antecedent to man) is a perpetual retelling of the Oedipal story; and monsters in general are projections of our guilt, fear, awe, and dread. Monsters, and certainly the “capital M” monsters of Gilmore’s limited approach, can more or less be explained away by adverting to Freud, and the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams more or less becomes a line in the sand differentiating “us” (the enlightened readers of Gilmore) from “them” (those fools who believe in these sorts of things). If one does not understand them as projections of the psyche, and only that, one needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern era. Then, and only then, can one appreciate …