Warner, Marina. Monsters of Our Own Making: The Peculiar Pleasures of Fear.

Levy, Michael

Warner, Marina. Monsters of Our Own Making: The Peculiar Pleasures of Fear. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2007. 441 pp. Trade Paper. ISBN 978-0-8131-9174-4. $25.00.

First things first. Monsters of Our Own Making isn't exactly a new book. Rather it's the first paperback edition of a study initially published in 1998, not long after Warner's bestselling From the Beast to the Blond: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (1994). In its previous incarnation, however, the book was called No Go the Bogey Man: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock. Bogey Man received good reviews upon its initial publication but caused nowhere near the stir that From the Beast to the Blond did, and I'm guessing that its rather obscure title was part of the problem. Warner implies as much in the short author's note at the beginning of this edition which states that the original title "concealed more than it revealed about the contents of the book." It should be noted, however, that this title, if obscure, was accurate, for various versions of the Bogeyman character are central to much of Warner's argument, and the book's three major divisions are quite properly named Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock.

It should also be noted that this volume is not really a revised or second edition of the original. Other than the author's note and a six-page afterword, Monsters of Our Own Making remains unchanged from its original state of publication. All internal mentions of Warner's study, even the headings on each left-hand page of the volume, still reference Bogey Man. Thus, although Warner's afterword does reveal a number of interesting later thoughts on her topic, no one who read the original should feel an overwhelming need to purchase this volume.

Those who did not read Bogey Man, however, and who have a serious interest in the horrific, may well wish to read Monsters. As was the case in From the Beast to the Blond, Monsters features a wide-ranging and incredibly detailed examination of its topic. A cultural historian and mythographer by training, Warner is intimately acquainted with the folklore and history of the horrific and ranges widely through the relevant literary classics and works of fine art (the book is heavily illustrated in both black and white and color). Scholars of contemporary horror fiction should take note, however, that the author has little interest in, or at least devotes very little space to, genre work. When looking for a modern example of some time-honored horrific convention or icon, Warner almost invariably limits her references to either currently practiced folk traditions, contemporary films such as Blade Runner, Pulp Fiction, or Cronenberg's The Fly, or violent videogames like Warhammer. Philip K. Dick, Doris Lessing, and Angela Carter do receive passing mention, though, as do a number of children's classics.

Warner's introduction states that her book "is about fear: it faces one of the most everyday yet least examined of human feelings and it describes three of the principal methods of coping with anxieties grounded in common experience, as well as the nameless terrors that come in the dark and assail the mind" (4). She continues, it "is also a collection of stories about the bogeys who materialize fear in some kind of living shape, about their character and their ways; it traces themes and metaphors that refract kaleidoscopically throughout the material of terror" (4). Part 1, "Scaring," begins with a history of the Bogeyman and related figures of terror from Goethe's "Erlking" to Mr. Punch to the paintings of Goya (a favorite subject) to Raymond Briggs's scatological children's book Fungus the Bogeyman. Warner's sheer depth of knowledge continually impresses, and her analysis invariably makes sense. She is particularly interested in the recurring motif of cannibalism, especially as it intersects with infanticide and incest, from the ancient myth of Saturn/Kronos devouring his children (and particularly Goya's obsession with this myth) to the Grimm Brothers's "Juniper Tree" to the contemporary performance artist Bobby Baker's life-sized installation entitled An Edible Family in a Mobile Home. Other chapters in this part of the book examine such mythic monsters as Scylla and the Cyclops, various cannibalistic versions of Satan, the disturbing problem of the Eucharist ("This is my body you eat"), attitudes towards dissection, children's darker and often cannibalistic feelings about food (Sendak's "I'll eat you up, I love you so"), and the great pleasure many children (as well as adults) get from being scared within the context of a work of art.

The much shorter part 2, "Lulling," begins with a detailed examination of one of Caravaggio's more beautiful paintings, "The Rest on the Flight into Egypt," which features a sleeping Virgin and Child and an androgynous but decidedly sexy angel playing on a viol. Soon, however, Warner turns to the sometimes unrecognized hostility and even straightforward terror that can be found in even the sweetest sounding lullabies and bedtime rhymes, including the memorable:

 Piss a Bed
 Piss a Bed
 Barley Butt--
 Your Bum is so heavy
 You can't get up

from Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book of 1744. She also devotes an entire chapter to lullabies and other children's poems that concern themselves with King Herod and the New Testament's Massacre of the Innocents.

Part 3, "Making Mock," concerns stories, poems, folktales, paintings, and other works of art that, subtlely or straightforwardly, make fun of their subjects, often with considerable viciousness, sometimes as a result of genuine hatred, occasionally out of a need to whistle past the graveyard. Warner writes brilliantly about the etchings and paintings of Goya, particularly The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, Saturn Devouring His Child, and Los Caprichos; the myth of Circe and its many variations, including Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau; and various traditional portrayals of Jews, ogres, giants, and other undesirables. There's even a rather bizarre and inspired chapter devoted to the humorous, horrific, and often pornographic properties attributed to bananas, from the popular British cartoon strip of the 1980s, The Big Hard One, to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow to the gyrations of Carmen Miranda and Josephine Baker. The photograph of post-WWII British Prime Minister Clement Attlee offering a young girl a banana is particularly fetching. The volume then closes with an epilogue that centers on that most unsavory of classic children's writers, Heinrich Hoffmann (whose humorously terrifying "The Story of Augustus Who Would Not Have Any Soup" was one of my childhood favorites), along with the aforementioned afterword, in which Warner ties in Harry Potter, Osama bin Laden, and the films of Tim Burton, among other topics.

Those looking for a tightly argued volume with a clear thesis threading its way throughout may leave Monsters of Our Own Making dissatisfied. Warner has important things to say about fear and the relationships we forge with it through art, but her method is invariably both discursive and anecdotal. Still, this is a masterful volume which should be more widely known and which should be read by anyone interested in arriving at a better understanding of what scares us and why.