Who Are the Best Monsters in Literature?

I’m kind of obsessed with monsters. Not monster as in “terrible person” but monster as in “the thing living under your bed.” I can’t help it, there’s something so honest about them. A monster is a creature that’s absolutely incapable of hiding its hideousness, its strangeness, its furry/scaly/slimy-ness. A monster can’t be anything but itself, even if that self is difficult to look at or impossible to fathom—and who among us has never felt difficult to look at or impossible to fathom? It follows that I’m also obsessed with monster literature. Monster literature (a real term that I didn’t invent just now) is when a book is about a creature, but that creature is largely misunderstood or hated or causes a lot of general disgust. Think Frankenstein, Dracula, Mrs. Caliban. These are the kinds of books that have me kicking my feet and giggling in delight.

My new book Mothman Is My Boyfriend is set in a fictional town where humans and monsters (specifically cryptids) live together—and date each other. The book is a short story collection of human-cryptid romances where each story centers on a different human-cryptid relationship. I had to write about so many different types of monsters for this book—wolfmen and sea creatures and alien robots and a butch lesbian bigfoot—that I’m basically a monster expert now. And as a monster expert, I have some recommendations for books that are also playing in the monster-literature space. These books are weird and surprising and often pretty fun, much like Mothman Is My Boyfriend. Without further ado, I’d like to introduce you to some of my favorite contemporary works of monster literature.

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José Luis Zárate, tr. David Bowles, The Route of Ice and Salt

In Zárate’s queer, cult Mexican novella, the voyage of the Demeter is seen through fresh eyes. The Route of Ice and Salt doesn’t change the time period, setting, or context of the original story, but instead it offers a new point of view into the events of a small chapter of Dracula. Told in journal entries, the novella explores the interiority of the Demeter’s unnamed captain who is, in this version, a repressed gay man both obsessed and disgusted by his intense desire to have sex with men. Also, Dracula is there. This book is horny and absolutely crusty with saltwater and bodily fluids, but in a way that’s very cool and tasteful. Did Zárate invent gay monsterfucker literature? Technically no, but in another sense, definitely yes.

Melissa Broder, The Pisces

Sex addiction and killer mermen and Venice Beach—this book has it all (as long as you’re about 80% insane). Broder’s novel about a disaffected woman who falls for a merman is fun and weird and sexy and painful and honest. It hurt my feelings really bad, but it also fixed me a little. I was definitely channeling some of The Pisces’ energy when I was writing Mothman Is My Boyfriend (and even more of it when I wrote the book’s erotic companion, Mothman Is My Daddy). There’s a line in this novel where she compares a man’s penis to a gherkin and I think about it all the time.

Mariana Enriquez, tr. Megan McDowell, Our Share of Night

Our Share of Night contains many monsters and is haunted by many things. It’s a brutal novel but a fascinating one. There are old gods and corrupt governments and occult rituals and at least one box of eyelids. It’s a ghost story sometimes and a historical document other times, but it’s always, always full of monsters. Tracing several decades in the life of a family in Argentina as they’re alternately hunted and used by a cult, Our Share of Night is fascinating because of how willing it is to explore darkness on both large and small scales.

Maggie Su, Blob: A Love Story

In making this list, I had a weirdly hard time choosing just one blob monster. There are a lot of books about sentient blobs. But I love some romance—especially if it’s unhinged and maybe a little gross. The basic premise of this novel is that a woman finds a pile of goo and attempts to shape it into her perfect man. I think this is as valid an attempt at finding love as any. Given the choice between swiping on Tinder and feeding cereal to a thing I found next to a trash can, I would choose the latter. This book is funny and weird and I appreciate getting some monster lit that’s mostly interested in having a good time.

Samanta Schweblin, tr. Megan McDowell, Little Eyes

Personally, I feel that the panopticon Furbies in Little Eyes count as monsters. What else would you call an iDog that lives in your home and watches your every move and is being controlled by a stranger? In Schweblin’s sci-fi horror novel, stuffed animals called “kentukis” are an international hit. Kentuki owners are watched at all times by a random stranger on the internet, and the internet strangers get to control a kentuki and observe the life of a random individual. Sometimes this leads to moments of beautiful connection, sometimes it leads to something darker. But such is the life of a monster—they aren’t inherently good or bad, they’re just unexpected.

Octavia E. Butler, Fledgling

There are a lot of great creatures in Butler’s opus, but I’m partial to the Ina—the weird, vampire-esque beings from Fledgling. I like that they speak so logically but have to center their lives around their uncontrollable animal instincts. I like that they’re queer and that they love sex (and all the metaphors for sex that are inherent to any vampire story). I like that the book itself mirrors the Ina by being so feral and so restrained at once. There are so many layers! And good monsters (like all ogres) have layers.

Sayaka Murata, tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori, Earthlings

Is Natsuki really an otherworldly creature, or is she a regular woman with a difficult past? Most, if not all, monsters deal in some level of ambiguity: not human but not wolf, not alive but not dead, not wholly real, but not completely imagined. That’s why Earthlings is actually an excellent example of monster literature. The book refuses any simple answers and instead allows us a chance to see the world through the eyes of someone who feels completely outside of the world. And that’s really the ultimate goal of all monster lit.

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McKayla Coyle’s Mothman Is My Boyfriend is available now from Quirk Books.