You know you’re not reading a typical encyclopedia when it
starts with a quote from Bugs Bunny. Nevertheless, The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters earns
its name, covering an array of fantastic creatures in a single, monstrous
625-page volume. Editor Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock whittled his initial list of
1,000 monsters down to about 200, but because some of those entries are very
wide-ranging (Animals, Monstrous; Bible, Monsters in The; Women,
Monstrous) Weinstock’s contributors check a lot more than 200 off the list.
With that multitude of contributors comes a multitude of approaches, some more
successful than others, to studying creatures from Angel to Zombie.
Some of the most pervasive monsters— Demon, Extraterrestrial, Ghost,
Witch/Wizard—comprise a sizeable chunk of the book with multiple
contributors exhaustively detailing how they have been portrayed in books,
films, TV shows, comics, and games
throughout world history. Some get more attention than they deserve (Brownie
is a slightly longer entry than Devil, The, Dracula, or Frankenstein’s
Monster). At least one of the most essential and influential monsters—Hyde,
Edward—is absurdly short-changed, the most essential and influential of his
films—Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 adaptation— not receiving any mention at all. Some
entries are little more than lists of books and films with microscopic synopses
and little in the way of historical background or analysis (Death,
Personified, for example).
Most entries, however, strike a strong balance between the
histories, insightful analyses, and lists of examples we expect of an authoritative
encyclopedia. There are no significant absences and plenty to discover in the
way of relatively unfamiliar creatures, such as Devil-Bug, the monster
doorman from George Lippard’s The Monks
of Monk Hall, the soothsaying Donestre of the Middle Ages, the
child-killing Empousa of ancient Greek folklore, the world-creating
ocean goddess Tiamat, a big Kosher bird called Ziz, and Kappa,
a goofy-looking Japanese swamp monster that pulls kids’ internal organs out
through their butts.
