Enchanted Creatures: Our Monsters and their Meanings

by Natalie Lawrence

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.

Review edited 10th July 2025 to respond to the author’s rebuttal and give her concern about my review a fair hearing, now I have a copy of the book on hand again.

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 author’s contention (in comments on this post) is that it is, quote, “rather obvious” that she is not referring to Circe as a “snake woman”, but instead as a “difficult female mythical character”. In response, I quote the book itself:

“Recent novels such as Madeline Miller’s Circe (2018), Natalie Haynes’s Stoneblind (2022) or Nikki Marmery’s Lilith (2023) give these snake women inner worlds, detangling them from the snakes.”

Possibly the author meant “snake women” to mean “a difficult female mythical character”, but this was far from clear, given the chapter concerns… you guessed it… snake women. Almost all, if not all, of the other examples are of women who are indeed associated with snakes. If she was switching tack to discuss “monstrous” women in mythology more generally, she should probably not have called them “snake woman” after a whole chapter that is literally about snake women.]

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