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I’ve been looking forward to reading Monsterland all year, so I was thrilled to receive a copy for review from my friends at Scribe. The blurb promises an exploration of monster stories from around the globe: giants, dragons, ogres, zombies, ghosts, and all the other things that go bump in the night.
Monsters have a long history, as Jubber lays out in the introduction. The first known carvings depicting monsters are 40,000 years old, and the first monster was depicted in literature around 4,000 years ago in The Epic of Gilgamesh. The word ‘monster’ comes from the Latin monstare (to show, reveal), and that informs Jubber’s thesis: that the monsters we create reveal who we are.
Dragons can represent anything you want them to.
Monsterland (Page 55)
Monsterland isn’t introspective enough to be considered a travel memoir, nor is it journalistic enough to read as straight non-fiction. The anecdotes from locals that would give it a documentary flavour are told quickly, with brief descriptive paragraphs about the interviewee that don’t really allow the reader to connect with them personally. I guess I was expecting more of a taxonomy of monsters and their history, but it’s actually a rapid-fire overview of the monsters’ countries of origin and the cultures/communities that give them life.
It’s all fascinating, but I’ll admit I struggled to sink into Monsterland. I think it would have benefited from a strong single narrative threaded through the chapters, beyond simply “monsters are cool and I travelled around the world looking for them”. It’s a chimera of history, anthropology, and memoir which will no doubt delight a niche of invested readers but may struggle to connect for a broader audience.
Read Monsterland on audiobook via Libro.fm here. (affiliate link)
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