Uses of the Undead: Part One

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters — Goya (1797)

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that those who feel helpless, must be in want of a monster.

Well, maybe not universally, but so it seems to me. When events concatenate in a way too complex for our hunter-gatherer minds, we find it useful to simplify. Animism is one often successful way of doing this: by personifying external entities or events, humans can bring their immense “mind-reading” abilities to bear on otherwise intractable com...