poisonenvy's reviews
849 reviews

Monster Theory is a collection of essays that was published in 1996, and at times it shows its age.  While its hard for me to know exactly how groundbreaking it was when it was published thirty years ago, now a lot of the concepts were things I was already aware of (mostly because I took a class on Ghosts, Monsters and Demons in 2019 which heavily influenced how I look at them). 

I, for some godforasken reason, decided to read every essay in this book, even ones where I hadn't read the primary text it was discussing.  Why?  Because I'm insane, I guess. I don't fucking know.  I only really had to read the preface and the introduction for the paper I'm intending to write.  There's a couple other essays that I thought might have touched on other papers I'm considering writing, but I learned pretty quickly that they didn't so I could have just skipped them.  Did I? No.  No, I decided to give myself extra reading, which is definitely what someone needs to give themself in a semester where they're taking five high-level English classes.  Go me, I guess  (To be fair, this was an Interlibrary Loan, and I felt bad that my library summoned it all the way from BC if I wasn't going to make full use of it.  And <i>something</i> useful might have cropped up! You never know until you try). 

There were two essays that discussed conjoined twins and birth defects, and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about them being included in a collection of essays about monsters (though I recognize that historically birth defects were historically called 'monstrous births,' especially since I wrote a paper about Richard III last semester.  But I guess it was the 90s so....)

Monster Culture (Seven Theses) by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

Definitely the most useful chapter in terms of my "Pirates as Monsters" term paper I intend to write. This is just seven short theses, a couple paragraphs each, and while I have absolutely nothing to base this on, I suspect that this essay is where most of Monster Theory as we know it today arose from.  I really nice overview of what monster theory is in general. 

Beowulf as Palimpsest by Ruth Waterhorse

I have read Beowulf! I read J.R.R. Tolkein's translation of it last year!  Unfortunately, most of this essay went over my head anyway. I'm definitely not a Beowulf scholar, that's for sure.  But it was still pretty interesting, comparing Beowulf's monsters to modern day monsters such as Mr Hyde and Dracula (both books I'm also reading this semester for my Horror class).  I generally enjoyed this one!

Monstrosity, Illegibility, Denegation: De Man, bp Nichol, and the Resistance to Postmodernism by David L. Clark

This essay is written in extremely difficult academic language, and is analysing a few texts which I didn't even know existed, let alone had read. It discusses the concept as language in and of itself as being a monster. It was pretty interesting, the things I was able to understand.  Unfortunately, most of this essay sailed way above my head. 

The Odd Couple: Gargantua and Tom Thumb by Anne Lake Prescott

I haven't actually read anything this essay covered, but it's basic English folklore, so like... osmosis haha.  It discusses giants and extremely tiny people (like Tom Thumb, a man as tall as a thumb), and how they're often partnered together.  I generally enjoyed this essay, and had some fun with it. It even gave me tiny plot bunnies that will probably never amount to anything but are happily hopping around in my brain anyway now.  It also, weirdly, might have given me something for an essay I may or may not write this semester; it is the only essay besides the preface and the "Seven Theses" that did.

America's "United Siamese Brothers": Chang and Eng and Nineteenth-Century Ideologies of Democracy and Domesticity by Allison Pingree

This isn't about literature per se, and more about the historical case of... well, America's first set of "Siamese Twins," conjoined twins who were whisked away from their homeland of Siam so that they could be paraded around the UK and America and shown off for money in "Freak Shows" in the early 19th century. It discusses a lot about what conjoined twins say about American ideals, such as individualism and law (at one point, one of the twins punched/assaulted someone, but they could not be arrested because the other twin was innocent, and so it was a matter of "do we let the guilty man go free or do we lock up an innocent man"), as well as family values (they both got married, but how would the American public see that?  Is it incest when they have sex with their wives if the other twin must be present? Is it homoerotic?).  Overall, it was a generally interesting essay, even if it did see Chang and Eng more as a concept than as humans. 

Liberty, Equality, Monstrosity: Revolutionizing the Family in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein by David A. Hedrich Hirsch

I have also read Frankenstein! In fact, am reading it again for my Horror Class.  This was one of the essays I thought might help in one of my papers I might need to write.  But, it mostly looked at Frankenstein through a historical lens of a piece of history I know about (the French Revolution) but do not know about that particular aspect of (how it revolutionized how families were seen).  Probably interesting to someone who's both stoked on the French Revolution and <i>Frankenstein</i>, but that person is not me.

"No Monsters at the Resurrection": Inside Some Conjoined Twins by Stephen Pender

This is the second essay in this collection (seriously, why are there two essays in a book of 14 essays that is about this) that is about conjoined twins and birth defects, this time gazed at through a medieval religious lens. Didn't really interest me too much (and yet I still read the whole thing). 

Representing the Monster: Cognition, Cripples, and Other Limp Parts in Montaigne's "Des Boyteux" by Lawrence D. Kritzman

An essay about a piece of literature I've never read and know nothing about.  I read it.  Most of it flew right past because I had no idea what it was talking about.  Why am I like this?

Hermaphodites Newly Discovered: The Cultural Monsters of Sixteenth-Century France by Kathleen Perry Long

I have never read the book that this essay was about (Mostly <i>Isle des Hermaphodites</i> by Artus Thomas, though it also discusses the court of King Henri III which I knew nothing about but now know was probably extremely gay).  Despite not having read the source material, this essay was still very easy to follow and understand, and I found it extremely interesting. It discusses gender norms and societal constructs and constraints, and overall I enjoyed it quite a lot. 

Anthropometamorphosis: John Bulwer's Monsters of Cosmetology and the Science of Culture by Mary Baine Campbell

A lot about xenophobia and making other cultures monstrous through fiction.  Overall, I found it fairly interesting. 

Vampire Culture by Frank Grady

This was the second essay I thought might be an interesting resource for a paper I might write, but discovered very quickly that it did not apply, but I finished it anyway.  It starts off discussing Dracula as a discussion of capitalism, and then shifts to Interview with a Vampire (which I also have not read) as the same, plus some feminist critques as well.  Overall, fairly interesting, even if I only know of Interview with a Vampire through Cultural Osmosis.

The Alien and Alienated as Unquiet Dead in the Sagas of the Icelanders by William Sayers

I don't know anything about Viking Family Sagas, but they sound cool.  I'll admit that I didn't read this essay especially closely (it was late at night and I was tired), but from what I gleamed it seemed fairly interesting.

Unthinking the Monster: Twelfth-Century Responses to Saracen Alterity by Michael Uebel

An essay about Islam as a monster in the twelfth century.  Extremely interesting.  I wonder how or if this essay would have changed had it been written post 9/11.  Overall, I was very interested in this one.

Dinosaurs-R-Us: The (Un)Natural History of Jurassic Park by John O'Neill

Well, this guy certainly has a.... angry?  writing style which could have been interesting if I could have at all figured out what he was trying to say.  Is this a critique about capitalism? The family?  Something about abortions?  Children?  Sexuality?  I have no fucking idea.  But whatever O'Neill was trying to say, he said it with a whole lot of passion.   

This is exactly what the title proclaims it to be: a very short introduction to horror.  It touches on a variety of different flavours of horror: Monsters, occult, body horror, psychological horror, and scientific horror, and gives a brief overview of them from a critical analysis perspective. 

It is just a brief introduction, so none of the analysis goes super deep. But newbies to analyzing horror through a critical lense will find if useful, and even oldbies might find something useful in the pages. If not, it is, at least, extremely readable; it is not bogged down with academic writing, and even if you haven't read or watched everything it discusses, you can still understand the central arguments (but it's even better if you have). 

A Marriage Below Zero is one of the very first novels in English literature to feature a same-sex, male/male relationship in it. 

In it, the young Elise falls in love with Arthur, a charming young man who is the very close friend of Captain Dillington. They are, in fact, so close that they are known jeeringly as Damon and Pythias. 

Her marriage is not happy, though, and though she suspects another woman, all she finds is Captain Jack Dillington.

Elise is sometimes funny, though often caustic, and I suspect that Alan Dale/Alfred Cohen has never really spoken to a woman (not seriously, at least; the book is filled with thinly veiled misogyny). And it's not exactly a pro-gay, either. But it's not as egregious in either front as one might expect from a novel written in the Victorian Era, and it still managed to entertain me throughout. 

Angela Carter is an... Interesting author. She switches between tenses and POV (sometimes jumping from first person to third person within the same paragraph) apparently without rhyme or reason (I mean, I imagine there's some reason; I have not done a close enough read for any story to know that for sure). A lot of the time I came out of my first read of a story (none of them have been given second reads just yet) not knowing exactly what happened.  Some of her lines are breathtakingly beautiful, some of them are very funny. She's an author who likely needs to be read with fairly close attention. Anyway, I enjoyed this collection a lot. 

"The Bloody Chamber" 4*
Look, Bluebeard is my favourite fairy tale. This runs pretty close to the original fairytale, with some key differences (I had, for some time, considered writing a paper on what these differences are. That paper topic ended up getting cut though since there are other papers in this class I'd rather write more) 

"The Courtship of Mr Lyon" 4*
This is a Beauty and the Beast retelling which I enjoyed quite a lot. 

"The Tiger's Bride" 4* 
A lot of the same themes of the precious story; is also a Beauty and the Beast retelling. Also something I liked a lot. 

"Puss-in-Boots" 5* 
10/10. A+ story. The perfect amount of asshole licking.  Bravo. 

"The Erl-King" 3.5*
This was one of the stories that flips pronouns and perspective pretty confusingly (all of them do it to some extent, this one felt like the worst offender). I'm not super sure what happened here. It probably requires a second read, which I'll get to eventually. 

"Snow Child" ????
A Snow White retelling. One that reminded me a lot about Kaori Yuki's Snow White retelling. Anyway, my entire review can be summed up in three words: 

What. The. Fuck.  

"The Lady of the House of Love" 4.5*
You know, I'm not 100% sure I know what went on here but I'm here for the vibes and the vibes are immaculate. (Might possibly get worked into a Dracula paper about Monster Theory as applied to vampires about female sexuality)

"The Werewolf" 4* 
Little Red Riding Hood retelling 1. It was alright. Pretty straight forward. On the docket for a paper I might write in conjunction with female persecution, the witch trials, and Elizabeth Bathory. We'll see how that goes. 

"The Company of Wolves" 3* 
Little Red Riding Hood retelling 2. Trigger warning for weird sexual assault stuff.  

"Wolf-Alice" 3.5* 
This just gave me Assassin's Quest vibes. I'm here for it. Likely requires a second reading. 

What can I say? I really love these Wayfarer books, which are cozy and poignant and all found-family-y. 

A Closed and Common Orbit follows an AI named Sindra, a human named Pepper, both of whom are introduced in the previous book, and the family they have made. It's really good, very touching: I nearly started crying mid-work and it was only by the greatest strength of will that I avoided sobbing in public in the middle of my shift (but like, not a devestrating cry. A touched, warm crying).  

Chambers makes very good use of character voice to differentiate the characters too. Overall, an extremely enjoyable experience and I am sad I need to wait for a few weeks before I can start the next. 

Homosexuality in Renaissance England is a somewhat dry, very academic look at... Well, homosexuality in Renaissance England. The title is pretty much what you get (though the last chapter -- out of four -- is about the early 18th century and the birth of Molly houses).

Examining trial records and literature from the time, Bray argues that there wasn't some secret, gay-tolerant society hidden under the laws that would hang a man if he was found engaging in homosexual acts like some people claim. It wasn't something that people just quietly did while winking and nudging one another, everyone in on this funny joke that ostensibly gave the death penalty to gay men while secretly allowing them to continue. But he does claim that homosexuality was, nevertheless, something that existed and eventually found a network of communities in the 18th century that resisted the persecution and vitriol that was leveled at it. 

Like I said, it's fairly dry, but it's short (I finished it, cover-to-cover) in a single evening and it's very interesting. 

There are times when this book was very clearly written by a Straight White Man, but I am happy I can say that the explicit descriptions of naked teenage girls stops pretty early in the book (though that doesn't stop young adult women from going around shirtless nearly every time we see them, even in -50 weather) so you can instead enjoy all the descriptions of botulism, cannibalism (though strangely not as described as I would have expected) and general gore instead.

Overall, I very much enjoyed this book, which I listened to on Audio (Tom Sellwood is an *excellent* narrator, by the way). Throughout the novel there were some elements I wasn't stoked on (the expedition ended horrifically enough historically that having some possibly supernatural ice monster picking them off one by one felt like overkill), but by the end of the novel I felt like everything had come together quite nicely and even the elements I hadn't been sure of fit in quite nicely. I enjoy slow paced novels for the most part, and so I felt like the slow pace really helped with the creeping sense of dread and hopelessness. It did not end at all how I had expected it too. 

Someday, hopefully, I'll be able to watch the TV show too. 🤞

The Ghost Bird is a biologist who prefers the company of nature to people, and doesn't make friends very easily. Which means that a job exploring a strange wildness with a group of women who are also only known by their job titles is right up her alley. 

This book has a theme that a lot of the books I've read recently share, and now that I recognize it I'm pretty annoyed by it.  But other than that I enjoyed this a lot. The biologist is an extremely unreliable narrator, and all the things she doesn't write are just as, if not more, important than the things she does write, which makes this an extremely fun read. The prose is interesting. Some scenes were downright cinematic.  Overall, I enjoyed this one a lot. 

I will confess, after Captain Singleton I was skeptical about the other books in my Pirate Literature class. 

But this was actually great? It was scathing and high-key hilarious, excellent political commentary and satire.  I enjoyed both The Beggar's Opera and Polly, through I think I preferred Polly overall. 

It took a minute to get into it and to understand the operas sense of humour, but once I did I very much enjoyed it. 


SECOND READ-THROUGH, like, a few weeks later: 
First read through was focused mostly on social criticism by criticising the government. Second read through focused more on gender reversal and queer themes. Also another excellent read. 

There are many things that I recognize are a product of the fact that this book was written in 1720, before the form of the novel really became popular.  Things like the inconsistency of the tense, which switches from present tense to past tense without rhyme or reason, or the fact that I have rarely read a book that was paced so inconsistently (in the first seven pages of the book, our protagonist has been kidnapped, and then taken on by someone else, and then press ganged, and then taken by Portuguese sailors and then marooned on Madagascar, and then then next 130 pages are spent with the driest overland journey across Africa that I have ever read in my life).  I can also recognize that for a book written in 1720, this book probably could have been <i>more</i> racists, but that doesn't change the the fact that it was still extremely racist.  

I can recognize that a lot of this is because it was written in 1720.  That doesn't mean that that knowledge made this book at all more enjoyable. 

(Though I will say I appreciated how extremely gay the end of this narrative is. But alas, even that couldn't save it.)