Enchanted Creatures: Our Monsters and their Meanings

by Natalie Lawrence

Genres: Non-fiction
Pages: 368
Rating:

Synopsis:

The hydra rears its many heads in a flurry of teeth and poisonous fumes. The cyborg lays waste to humanity with a ruthless, expressionless stare.

From ancient mythology to modern science fiction, we have had to confront the monsters that lurk in the depths of our collective imagination. They embody our anxieties and our irrational terrors, giving form to what we don't wish to know or understand. For millennia, monsters have helped us to manage the extraordinary complexity of our minds and to deal with the challenges of being human.

In Enchanted Creatures, Natalie Lawrence delves into 15,000 years of imaginary beasts and uncovers the other-worldly natural history that has evolved with our deepest fears and fascinations. Join Lawrence on a tour of prehistoric cave monsters, serpentine hybrids, deep-sea leviathans and fire-breathing Kaiju. Discover how this monstrous menagerie has shaped our minds, our societies and how we see our place in nature.

Natalie Lawrence’s Enchanted Creatures is a fairly entertaining read, an attempt to dig into why humans imagine monsters, and what various kinds of monsters mean to us and what they say about us. It’s unfortunately one of those books where the research is marred by bizarre mistakes; the most basic check on Google would yield the info that the Goblin King in Labyrinth is called Jareth, not Jared, for instance.

When that kind of easily-verifiable fact is wrong, it really casts everything else into doubt. There is a bibliography with some references, which is somewhat reassuring, but… Jared? I know that’s wrong and I’ve never even seen Labyrinth.

Or there’s a section where she refers to Circe as one of several snake women who’ve had modern novels written from their point of view. What? Circe isn’t associated with snakes (as far as I’ve ever heard).

The more I think about it, the more it falls to bits — how can any conclusions be supported when this stuff is randomly mentioned without actual evidence? If you want me to accept that Circe’s a snake-woman in some way, then we need the evidence.

Rating: 2/5