The more I thought about the silent, invisible hordes of victims, the more I began to think that the word “monster” puts the focus in the wrong place. “Monster” keeps the focus on them—the charismatic megafauna, eating all the air. It would be easy to list all the monsters and all the terrible things they did, but to what end? I wondered: wasn’t calling them monsters, writing about their monstrousness, enumerating their monster sins, just a way of keeping them at the center of the story?
