Monster literature
The earliest examples of Gothic literature can be traced all the way back to English author Horace Walpole's novel The Castle of Otranto (1764).
In addition, Gothic inspired Monster literature evokes extreme emotions of sorrow, desolation, and isolation.
Dracula bites one of Johnathan's closest friends, Lucy Westenra, so Dr. Van Helsing calls upon various strong men to donate their blood to help cure her illness.
These infected beings, like vampires, only appear at night and taunt Neville with sexual promiscuity to come out of his home so they can suck his blood.
Neville struggles with loneliness and a sense of desolation after losing his wife and daughter in a plane crash while trying to escape the epidemic, and combats these emotions with a constant stream of alcohol.
The reader is constantly sympathizing with Neville, as he is portrayed as helpless and isolated, lacking any real chance of living a pleasant life.
In Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation (2014), the first novel in his Southern Reach trilogy, a team of four women venture out into a mysterious and ominous environment called Area X.
An example of this type of monster is the Crawler, which is utterly incomprehensible to the main character, the Biologist, who declares she knows “nothing at all”[2] about nature and life after seeing it.
This sense of dread is connected most clearly to the erasure of human exceptionalism, as the characters within Annihilation must struggle to understand that the environment holds power over them, rather than the other way around.
In earlier works, scientists and doctors were deemed as the most knowledgeable and were trusted by all even if they didn't provide proof for their claims.
Themes of isolation and duality are emphasized, but there is often a lack of any sort of scientific breakthrough in novels, opting instead for the perspective of the environment as exerting control.
Some well-known examples of Anthropocene Monster literature include books by Jeff VanderMeer, as well as Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender is the Flesh.
In I Am Legend, Robert Neville uses the most recent scientific advancements to search for preventative and curative medicine that will fight the vampire bacteria.
His only company is the horde of vampires that linger around his house wanting to suck his blood and drain the human qualities from him.
The most obvious example of duality in Monster Literature is in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
Other examples of duality in Monster Literature include vampires' resting state during the day and their evil rampages during the night (seen in both Dracula and I Am Legend).
