Stephen T. Asma, On Monsters ***

The back cover of this book refers to it as a "compendium of monsterology." The word "compendium" is well chosen, because the book covers a lot of ground but doesn't really make a consistent argument. The early chapters provide a history of the social purpose of monsters, later chapters focus on how we define monsters, and some chapters in the middle simply list famous monsters. Especially in the final chapters, Asma makes many points that are tangentially related to this main argument — evolutionary theory, Freudian psychology, Cartesian dualism. He makes the points well, but I lose the thread of his argument. It seems like he didn't want to omit any of the interesting material from his research notes.