“Monsterland” Shows What Monsters Really Mean https://ift.tt/O9qMyIT
From where does monster lore emerge, and why, throughout the centuries, does it continue to awe, to frighten, and to fascinate? This question centers Nicholas Jubber’s Monsterland, a prosaic journey through some of the globe’s most haunted and frightening monster lore and the regions from which they hail. Nonetheless, Jubber’s book is not simply another exploration and explication of the monsters that continue to shape the tales and traditions of many regions around the world. With careful attention and respect, Jubber also examines how traditions, people, and communities are bound together by creatures meant to frighten outsiders and teach valuable lessons.
Initially, Jubber creatively lures his audience into the monsters’ realms by making monsters personal. In the prologue, he reflects about how, as a boy, an adder’s bite—“a pair of puncture marks and a patch of itchy redness spreading around it” that eventually “turned to a sallow, ogreish green”—fueled Jubber’s imagination. He imagined developing “glowing buboes” and eyes that would “shoot up on stalks.” However, rather than succumbing to the adder’s bite or morphing into some hideous creature from a comic book’s pages, the incident sparked a lifetime of monster-love and research. This individual reflection is significant. It presents, at the smallest level, what impact monster tales, monster movies, and monster lore have on various audiences, and it also establishes how that intrigue develops and blossoms. This pattern continues throughout Monsterland, facilitating a sense of curiosity, fascination, and—most of all—interconnectedness.
Furthermore, Jubber explores the environmental relationships between communities and the monsters their traditions elevate. In “The Giant Who Fell in Love,” Jubber recounts the tale of Cornwall’s Bolster, of whom “the people live in terror” because he “rolls boulders onto their homes,” smelts their houses, and “sometimes he snatches up children and takes them home for his supper.” One day, Bolster is tricked by Saint Agnes, who challenges Bolster to prove his love for her by filling a hole in the ground with his blood. Saint Agnes’s trick is cruel: Bolster does not realize that the hole has been carved by the wind and the water all the way to the sea, so “he carries on bleeding” until he “collapses to his knees and topples over.” The villagers rejoice, and they accept Agnes’s teachings. More significantly, the tale shows the inexplicable connection between folklore and landscape. Jubber asserts that Bolster shows “how monsters echo their landscapes and join communities” and that giants like Bolster remind humans “that something came before us,” that humans are “denizens of the wild places that were eliminated for human societies to flourish.” Thus, Monsterland possesses a quiet eco-awareness and a reminder about how closely past civilizations lived with nature.
Other monsters—vampires, dragons, variations of the undead—make their expected appearances in Monsterland’s pages. However, in “The Humans Must Die,” a more realistic monster thrives, one “stronger than human beings” and “turning against humanity en masse”—robots. As Jubber points out, “it wasn’t until the age of industrialization that mechanical beings became a widespread possibility—and therefore a potential threat to the human race.” He points out that even in 1867, “Karl Marx wrote about the ‘mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories, and whose demon power, at first veiled under the slow and measured motions of his giant limbs, at length breaks out into the fast and furious whirl of his countless working organs.’” With the recent proliferation of AI, past literature’s mechanized beings might not seem so frightening. What Jubber effectively outlines, nonetheless, is that the fear of humanity’s takeover by technology is essentially nothing new. This chapter highlights literature, like Karel Čapek’s 1920 sci-fi play R.U.R, that might lie unexplored by the vast majority of readers. Jubber also unearths Čapek’s intent behind R.U.R, which resonates with a globe enveloped in capitalism, consumerism, and overconsumption. Jubber shares that, while writing R.U.R, Čapek wrote to his future wife, Olga, that his goal was to “‘warn against mass production and dehumanized slogans.’” The chapter also provides a history lesson that is a warning in itself: Karel Čapek, along with his brother, “was listed by the Gestapo as one of Czechoslovakia’s leading ‘public enemies’” as Hitler’s forces poured into Czechoslovakia. Jubber’s historical anecdotes about Čapek are a clear reminder that literature, like the monsters and landscapes his book so carefully explores, is a powerful force entirely its own—and sometimes the monster’s one encounters are not merely the creations from one’s imagination. They are literally the people next door.
Of course, Monsterland includes beloved movie monsters like Godzilla. In “King of the Monsters,” Jubber ventures to Japan and explores the various manifestations of Godzilla. He uncovers how Godzilla “tracks the changes in Japanese society and its relationship with the world.” Thus, beloved featured creatures like Godzilla develop a new socio-economic meaning. Jubber also attempts to crack the mysteries about Godzilla’s appeal as he poses the question, “What is it about this giant reptile with his swinging tail, glowing spinal plates, and really bad breath?” He asserts that once “they become our avatars, they make us indomitable,” and that, in their own way, monsters like Godzilla provide humans with the freedom and timeless legacies they so desperately desire.
Monsterland is a refreshing take on some of the world’s oldest and most shared pieces of monster lore. It’s also a spellbinding look into the histories, landscapes, and beliefs that have shaped the monsters that fill screens, books, and the larger collective imagination. These chapters show how those creatures humanity fears are, in many ways, simply mirrors of one’s self. Jubber’s work reminds audiences, too, of Boris Karloff’s unforgettable words: “The monster was the best friend I ever had.”
NONFICTION Monsterland By Nicholas Jubber
Scribe US
Published June 10, 2025
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