Hal Johnson's Blog, page 36

Apollonius of Tyana

One of the major characters in “Lamia” (as we hinted once before) was a real person—the philosopher Apollonius of Tyana, who lived in the first century in Greece, but traveled to Babylon, India, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Rome. “Noteworthy for his beauty” in his youth, he lived to a ripe old age: between eighty and one hundred, “yet were not his powers weakened, nor his mind dulled.” “True, the statue in the temple at Tyana shows many wrinkles on his forehead but his age was said to have been more pro...

“That Murderous Monster…”

Deadliest of the terrors of the sea, though, is no squid or island or even submarine but “a Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude and malignity” called Moby Dick. Some say Moby Dick is “continually athirst for human blood.” Some say Moby Dick is “not only ubiquitous, but immortal.” One thing is certain: Moby Dick always wins.

This great white whale once bit off the leg of one Captain Ahab, and Ahab spends a whole book—Moby Dick by Herman Melville (1851)—seeking revenge by hunting Moby Dick acros...

The Honest-to-Goodness Most Poisonous Book of All

(Don’t believe this mendacious post! This is the real one!)

Anthony Trollope was one of the most popular novelists in Victorian England (I haven’t read any of them because they have no monsters in them). One fine night in 1882 he was reading the novel Vice Versa by Thomas Anstey Guthrie (who wrote it under the name of F. Anstey, 1882). Now Vice Versa is a humorous novel about a father and son who switch brains. The father tries to go to school, the son tries to go to work, and both of them en...

The Wild Man

Gilgamesh’s buddy Enkidu is an very very early—the earliest—example of a monstrous figure that would become very popular in European art in the Middle Ages: the wild man. Sometimes called a woodwose in England, the wild man was a hairy, savage figure that lived in the woods. He featured in medieval art, often depicted decked with leaves and carrying a cudgel. He gradually became associated with or confused with a satyr—a mythological figure from ancient Greece that had goat’s legs and goat’s hor...

Zahhak and Prometheus

You might notice that the ending of the story of Zahhak is similar to the ancient Greek story of Prometheus. In Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus (460 BC), Prometheus steals fire from the gods and gives it to men, and is punished by being tied to a rock in the mountains. An eagle eats his liver, which then regrows, forever.

Over two thousand years after Aeschylus, Percy Shelley (the husband of Mary “Frankenstein” Shelley) wrote a sequel called Prometheus Unbound (1820). Unlike Zahhak, Prometheu...

On beyond Horla

The Horla is too strange to be perceived by human sense, but that’s not the only way a monster can be invisible. In Ambrose Bierce’s short story “The Damned Thing” (1893), two hunters encounter a huge monster they cannot see. One explains the reason: “There are sounds that we can not hear. At either end of the scale are notes that stir no chord of that imperfect instrument, the human ear…As with sounds, so with colors.…The human eye is an imperfect instrument; its range is but a few octaves of t...

The Ghost of Major André

Everyone in Sleepy Hollow is talking about the Ghost of Major André—but who is he?

John
André was a British officer and a spy during the American
Revolution, best known for helping the arch-traitor Benedict Arnold
betrayWest Point. He was captured near Tarrytown, New York, and later
tried, hanged as a spy, and buried in Tappan, New York, near the New
Jersey border.

Why
his spirit haunts the tree where he was captured (Tarrytown), and not
the grave where his body lies (Tappan), is a secre...

Thoughts on Medusa

“Call
it what you like: you look at things as they are.”

“Ah—I’ve
had to. I’ve had to look at the Gorgon.”

“Well—it
hasn’t blinded you! You’ve seen that she’s just an old bogey
like all the others.”

“She doesn’t blind one; but she dries up one’s tears.”

–from The Age of Innocence (1920) by Edith Wharton.

From The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The Renaissance knew of strange manners of poisoning—poisoning by a helmet and a lighted torch, by an embroidered glove and a jeweled fan, by a gilded pomander and by an amber chain. Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book. There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.”

More Monsters from Kafka

•Odradek, from the story “The Cares of a Family Man” (1919). This strange creature looks like a star-shaped spool of thread with one extra leg. It rolls around, lurking in shadows, trailing thread bits. No one knows what Odradek is, or how it lives, or if it can die. The Family Man’s specific “care” (referred to in the title) is the worry that the Odradek will live longer than he will, even though it’s just useless garbage.

•The gatekeepers from the story “Before the Law” (1915). If you seek ...