This pot begins: Originally I was going to start this with “The Monster Story begins with Frankenstein” but with a little more thought I realized something. It might actually start with Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift. In that satiric book, Lemuel Gulliver gets to experience personally what it is like to be a monster. First he is a giant among the Lilliputians, then he is a tiny person among the Brobdingnagians and at the end of the book, he is simply a human, or Yahoo, a much less wonderful creature than a Houyhnhnms. (This last part may have been an inspiration for Pierre Boulle’s The Planet of the Apes (1963).
If you’d like to read the rest, please check out Monster: From the Pages of Dark Worlds Quarterly.