The Quintessential Monster Library - Dark Worlds Quarterly

The Quintessential Monster Library might have an issue with our earlier Quintessential Ghost Story Library except it doesn’t really. The books and stories selected for this collection lie mostly outside the realm of ghosts and squarely in the territory of Science. “Monster” is defined as any terrifying thing of natural or unusual origin. This includes sea serpents, dinosaurs, giant spiders, carnivorous plants, gigantic children, etc. etc. The first writer to step into from the realm of the supernatural was Horace Walpole with his Gothic prototype, The Castle of Otranto (1765), but the Gothics veered away from real monsters under the influence of Ann Radcliffe.

It took Mary Shelley and Frankenstein to get us back on track. (This creation of the novel by an eighteen year old who had run off with a married man is almost as famous as the book itself.) Adam, Frankenstein’s creature, was not a ghost of the bodies used to create him, but a new thing in the world. The writer who most clearly promoted this type of story was H. G. Wells, who created many monsters but most with a logical or scientific origin.

Not all the stories here are rigorously entrenched in Science. Dracula by Bram Stoker has clearly supernatural origins but something else new happened in 1897. The supernatural agent of that novel, like the terrors of Sax Rohmer’s Brood of the Witch-Queen or the werewolves of Gerald Biss’s The Door of the Unreal, has a new presence in the world of humans. A traditional ghost story affects a small number of localized participants. For a short while the ghost is terrifying but contained to a haunted house or other location. Not so Count Dracula (or if you like a little Science to hinge things on, Mr. Hyde.) They have the power to conquer all of humanity if let loose.

I have limited myself to 1800 to 1929. The Pulp era would produce many, many monsters. They deserve their own library. I allowed myself to creep into the 1920 because many of the Victorian writers who began in the 1890s ended their careers in the 1920s. I have avoided Pulps except where they reprinted hard-to-find stories. You will not find the wonderful creations of H. P. Lovecraft here. What you will find is the authors who inspired H. P. L and his “The Supernatural Horror in Literature”.

Conclusion

You might have noticed this library is not as voluminous as the Ghost Story one. This is because I considered many works like “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook” with its wonderfully hairy demon by M. R. James as essentially a ghost story. Yes, these are monsters but in M. R. James’ mind they differ little from his other spectres. It is easy to split hairs, so I left many of my favorites in that collection instead. I have left all the ghostbreakers there too. I am sure you can name other stories I could have placed here, but these will get you started.

1 Comment Posted

Carl Rosenberg June 12, 2022 at 10:17 am

Many thanks for this overview! I like the literature of this period partly because of the way it often mixed up what today we would call fantasy, science fiction, horror, etc.–a period before fantastic literature began to be categorized into genres. As a reader, I don’t mind having genres–in a sense, I rather like them–but I also like it when the boundaries between them are porous. FYI, In recent years I discovered the work of an Argentine writer, Leopoldo Lugones (1984-1938), some of whose stories, first published before WWI, are collected in “Strange Forces: The Fantastic Tales of Leopoldo Lugones” (Latin American Literary Review Press, 2001).

Before the 1890s

1890s

1900s

1910s

1920s

Conclusion

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