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A review by megapolisomancy
On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears by Stephen T. Asma
1.0
My mom has been "in the process" of turning my old bedroom into a sewing room for about 10 years now. To that end, I get a lot of stuff dumped on me from time to time because she's cleaning out the closet (I think mostly just so new crap can be kept in that room). I'm sorry, not dumped-returned to me, or handed down to the grandkids, or whatever. Legacy stuff. Lots of comic books, lots of books like this:
We also found, on our last visit, a composition book with "CRECHERS" scrawled on the front, full of painstaking illustrations by a 6-year-old Zach. My imagination always outstripped my artistic ability by a pretty wide margin, though, so it's mostly triangles attached to squares with some wavy lines blowing up a building.
Anyway, my point is that monsters-as in nonhuman species of animals that play some sort of malignant role in our cultural imagination-are kind of a lifelong fascination of mine.
If these are the kinds of monsters you're interested in, though, you'll be pretty disappointed in this book, because they occupy about 15% of the text. What you get instead is a kind of rambling treatise on monsters-as in those things, mostly human, that have been "othered" to the degree that they are now considered inhuman. If this is a new and impressive idea to you, you might like this book. If you've read Benedict Anderson or Edward Said or David Roediger or (you get the picture), then the use of literal monsters to make this point might seem kind of clumsy and useless to you.
Also serial killers are monsters. See what he did there? Do you care about learning about serial killers? I don't.
Towards the end, furthermore, this book becomes a bizarre screed against "our" modern idea that everything is relative and that society is always to blame for monsters committing monstrous acts, never the specific individuals. "No sir," says Stephen Asma. "I think that people who do monstrous things simply ARE monsters." He then goes on to take a daring stance against some murderers from the Taliban, followed by a kind of halfhearted comparison with the torturers at Abu Ghraib. Seriously. Thank you, Stephen Asma, for standing up against all those intellectuals AND middle Americans AND neoconservatives who believe in a relativistic postmodern hyper-insistence on nurture over nature.* Again, seriously. This is his argument.
So, if you're interested in literally inhuman monsters, you'd be better off with Timothy Beal's Religion and its Monsters or any of the kid's books I mentioned above or pretty much anything else that's ever been written on the subject.
If you're interested in preserved fetuses and cabinets of wonder and physical evidence of "monsters," read Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 by Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park
If serial killers are your thing... I got nothing for you. Sorry. Maybe William Vollmann's book on violence?
This book is a dud.
* I guess this goes hand in hand with his repeatedly-mentioned macho essentialist arguments about male readers understanding his points about protecting children or needing to fight monsters to prove their manliness. This is usually preceded by something along the lines of "Although modern stories have produced female monster-killers like Ripley from the Alien films, traditionally..."**
** And one of those times, in a footnote, he goes on to explain that although cultural relativism or whatever is drawing women monster-killers into these narratives, biology just might win out in the end and make the man the dominant slayer of nightmares and defender of families once again... seriously.
We also found, on our last visit, a composition book with "CRECHERS" scrawled on the front, full of painstaking illustrations by a 6-year-old Zach. My imagination always outstripped my artistic ability by a pretty wide margin, though, so it's mostly triangles attached to squares with some wavy lines blowing up a building.
Anyway, my point is that monsters-as in nonhuman species of animals that play some sort of malignant role in our cultural imagination-are kind of a lifelong fascination of mine.
If these are the kinds of monsters you're interested in, though, you'll be pretty disappointed in this book, because they occupy about 15% of the text. What you get instead is a kind of rambling treatise on monsters-as in those things, mostly human, that have been "othered" to the degree that they are now considered inhuman. If this is a new and impressive idea to you, you might like this book. If you've read Benedict Anderson or Edward Said or David Roediger or (you get the picture), then the use of literal monsters to make this point might seem kind of clumsy and useless to you.
Also serial killers are monsters. See what he did there? Do you care about learning about serial killers? I don't.
Towards the end, furthermore, this book becomes a bizarre screed against "our" modern idea that everything is relative and that society is always to blame for monsters committing monstrous acts, never the specific individuals. "No sir," says Stephen Asma. "I think that people who do monstrous things simply ARE monsters." He then goes on to take a daring stance against some murderers from the Taliban, followed by a kind of halfhearted comparison with the torturers at Abu Ghraib. Seriously. Thank you, Stephen Asma, for standing up against all those intellectuals AND middle Americans AND neoconservatives who believe in a relativistic postmodern hyper-insistence on nurture over nature.* Again, seriously. This is his argument.
So, if you're interested in literally inhuman monsters, you'd be better off with Timothy Beal's Religion and its Monsters or any of the kid's books I mentioned above or pretty much anything else that's ever been written on the subject.
If you're interested in preserved fetuses and cabinets of wonder and physical evidence of "monsters," read Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 by Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park
If serial killers are your thing... I got nothing for you. Sorry. Maybe William Vollmann's book on violence?
This book is a dud.
* I guess this goes hand in hand with his repeatedly-mentioned macho essentialist arguments about male readers understanding his points about protecting children or needing to fight monsters to prove their manliness. This is usually preceded by something along the lines of "Although modern stories have produced female monster-killers like Ripley from the Alien films, traditionally..."**
** And one of those times, in a footnote, he goes on to explain that although cultural relativism or whatever is drawing women monster-killers into these narratives, biology just might win out in the end and make the man the dominant slayer of nightmares and defender of families once again... seriously.