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… Read More The End / Bibliography
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… Read More The Body Snatcher
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,… Read More "Fair Hieroglyphic"
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… Read More Cauldron Bubble
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… Read More Fe Fi Fo Fum
Use this one if you don’t like Milton. Now I will believeThat there are unicorns –Shakespeare, The Tempest
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… Read More Epigraph
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.
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,… Read More Apollonius of Tyre
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… Read More Apollonius of Tyana
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