A Guidebook to Monsters

Ryan J. Stark surveys the classic monsters in great literature and film, television, the Bible, and, perhaps unexpectedly, the world in which we live. Monsterdom is real, Stark observes, but often hidden beneath the concealment spell of modern secular thought. This guidebook aims to break that spell, and, if so, to confirm once more a world that brims with high strangeness, or what Christian philosophers have always called “reality.” The book appeals to those who study the paranormal dimensions of religion and horror, broadly imagined. The clergy will also find it helpful, as will players of monster-riddled video games.

Ryan J. Stark is professor of humanities at Corban University. He is the author of two books, Biblical Sterne (2021) and Rhetoric, Science, and Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (2009), and coeditor--with Tina Skouen--of Rhetoric and the Early Royal Society (2015).