Hal Johnson's Blog, page 35

What if General Howe had defeated Washington “at the Brunx”?

…Washington this way, that, pious invoke meridian night, prayed nocturnal, be dilatory, a stillness unheard those climes before; a higher hand bid ocean slumber, winds be silent, billows mackerel, a misty curtain, drawn omnipotent arm; Aurora rose, amaz’d the English hero, his opponent on the opposite shore…
•Albion: In Twelve Books (1822).

Once upon a time the Founding Fathers kicked the British out of America and founded the United States and everyone was happy forever. The end.

ii. Of course, n...

The End / Bibliography

Below is a fairly complete list of all the books, stories, and poems talked about in The Big Book of Monsters and in this blog over the last nine months. The only works omitted are 1. those mentioned merely in other (ho hum!) lists, and 2. the occasional recent book that snuck in among all these old ones.

I’m not telling you you should read every text listed below—I sure haven’t! If you do, though, you’ll end up with a pretty good (but very weird) education about the state of Western literatu...

The Body Snatcher

If I’d read this story earlier, I’d’ve mentioned it earlier, but I hadn’t so I didn’t, and anyway: Robert Louis Stevenson has a story called “The Body Snatcher” (1884), and it is totally his scariest story. You should go read it, and the only thing I’ll say is that a “resurrection man” (as mentioned in the story) is a professional who (illegally) procures cadavers for doctors to dissect. That part might not be clear from the story, but if you know that, that’s all you need.

This blog is almos...

"Fair Hieroglyphic"

We know (see The Big Book of Monsters p. 7) that for centuries hieroglyphics were unreadable—but the point is, they were famously unreadable. Like a metaphor for illegibility. Here, for example, is a brief passage from Edward Young’s long religious poem Night Thoughts (1745):

…On yon cerulean plain,
In exultation to their God, and thine,
They dance, they sing eternal jubilee,
Eternal celebration of His praise.
But, since their song arrives not at our ear,
Their dance perplex’d exhibits to the sig...

Cauldron Bubble

Macbeth’s “eye of newt and toe of frog” is the most famous recipe for witches’ brew (see The Big Book of Monsters, p. 147), but Shakespeare’s contemporaries came up with others. This is from Thomas Middleton’s play The Witch (ca. 1616):

1st Witch: Here’s the blood of a bat.
Hecate: Put in that, oh, put in that.
2nd Witch: Here’s libbard’s bane.
Hecate: Put in again.
1st Witch: The juice of toad, the oil of adder.
2nd Witch: Those will make the younker madder.
Hecate: Put in; there’s all, and rid th...

Fe Fi Fo Fum

Fe fi fo fum (see The Big Book of Monsters p. 141) is a very old rhyme, and no one knows where it comes from. In Shakespeare’s play King Lear (1606), the character Edgar pretends to be crazy, and says:

Child Rowland to the dark tower came,
His word was still,—Fie, foh, and fum,
I smell the blood of a British man.

Nonsense words! Was Edgar pretending to be a giant?

In any case, Edgar’s nonsense babble not only contains the famous fe fi fo fum couplet, it also includes the phrase “Childe Ro...

Epigraph Runner-Up

Use this one if you don’t like Milton.

Now I will believe
That there are unicorns

–Shakespeare, The Tempest

Epigraph

Every book I write is supposed to have an epigraph (a quotation that sits at the beginning of the book), but editors don’t like them and sometimes they get cut. Anyway, I wanted The Big Book of Monsters to have this epigraph, so please print it out, cut it out, and paste it on the inside of your copy (assuming it’s not a library copy).

Nature breeds,
Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things,
Abominable, inutterable, and worse
Than fables yet have feigned, or fear conceived,
Gorgons and Hydr...

Apollonius of Rhodes

Oh, yeah! There’s also this guy! He wrote the Argonautica (see The Big Book of Monsters p. 45). I guess it was just a common name back then.

Apollonius of Tyre

But the saintly Apollonius of Tyana isn’t the only Apollonius from the olden days. Apollonius of Tyre was the star of an ancient Greek novel (now lost), which was adapted into many versions in the middle ages. John Gower tells Apollonius’ story in his really very long collection of tales Confessio Amantis (ca. 1390): Apollonius, “a yong, a freissh, a lusti knyht” travels to Antioch to try to win a princess in a riddling contest. Instead, he ends up fleeing for his life, and then sails back and f...