Maniacs, wendigos, and goatmen—Oh my! David Puglia’s North American Monsters: A Contemporary Legend Casebook is a much-needed and valuable exploration into the monstrous menagerie that lurks throughout the North American continent. Rising to the inherent challenges associated with justifying and advocating for the serious study of monsters in academic circles while also creating an accessible and enjoyable read for a general audience, Puglia has masterfully curated this incredible addition to both folklore and monster studies alike. To offer what he declares is a volume that is “the first of its kind” (32), Puglia draws on several multidisciplinary academic case studies that employ a diverse range of research methodologies and fieldwork, to emphasize the vast rhetorical power that monsters hold and the immense cultural insights we can gain from their study.
Before the work of the collection begins, readers are treated to three introductory pieces (not including a rich acknowledgments chapter filled with some of folklore’s heavy hitters) that begin to lay the groundwork the rest of the book is built on. First, folklorist Elizabeth Tucker provides a thoughtful forward to the collection, where she not only celebrates Puglia’s work but also gives readers an intriguing, yet brief, examination of how masculinity pervades many North American monster legends. Following this, Puglia’s preface provides an analytic overview of how the study of monsters has traditionally been viewed within academic circles, while highlighting the interdisciplinarity of monster scholarship and emphasizing its surprising absence within folklore studies. Having identified this omission, Puglia positions this work as an attempt to begin filling this gap and as a means of bringing monster studies from the fringes and solidifying its place as a legitimate form of scholarship. In the last of these introductory pieces, “Are There Monsters?,” Puglia responds to a question asked by a person named Virginia wondering if there are, in fact, monsters in North America. In what I find as an intensely powerful rhetorical move that sets the tone for the collection of essays that follows, Puglia answers Virginia’s question with a resounding yes! In a definitive, yet playful tone, he leaves Virgina and readers with a dire promise by circling back to her original question, "Are monsters real?" Puglia states, "Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing more real and abiding than the lurking terror of creatures who live outside the rules and boundaries of civilization. No monsters! They live now, and they live forever" (xxii).
The book itself comes in at just over 300 pages and offers a collection of nineteen essays gathered from previously published scholarship, spanning the period from the 1970s to the 2010s, and from multiple disciplines, including biology, American studies, communications, healthcare, journalism, education, and several others. Alongside these republished works, Puglia also includes several new essays crafted for this collection from some of the foremost scholars in folklore and beyond, who study monsters and other contemporary legends. This amalgam of over five decades of diverse ideological approaches is one way that North American Monsters truly shines and exemplifies the presence and applicability of monster studies to disciplines other than those where it is usually placed, like folklore and English, while also reaffirming Puglia’s idea that monsters will live forever.
In a similar move that sees the author advocating for bringing monster studies in from the fringes and giving it a place at the academic table, Puglia also argues that one of the goals of this collection is to bring the monster of legend from the “out there” to the “in here” by focusing on the local-legend subgenre of the overarching legend genre. Accordingly, each piece included in this collection was chosen for how it handles local and regional narratives of the monsters that stalk each essay, their legends, and how they reflect the local geography, industry, infrastructure, and worldview of the communities where they are found. While each essay has its own way of navigating local landscapes and ideologies, together they culminate in a rich tapestry showing how the monsters of legend have made their homes in our own backyards. Every one of these essays is fantastic on its own, but together they help to justify the mainstreaming of monster studies that Puglia sets out to accomplish.
While examining Puglia’s work, I approached the text from three positionalities (educator, folklorist, and reviewer) that ultimately informed my reading and overall assessment. The first of these is my role as a composition instructor who often utilizes monster studies to explore, analyze, and navigate differences in today’s society in my classes. From this point of view, Puglia’s collection provides an easily accessible and fun introduction to monster studies that can be utilized in a variety of classes (particularly freshman composition and introductory folklore/anthropology courses) and will absolutely be integrated into many of my future course designs. Second, as a folklorist with a passion for both monsters and contemporary legend, I find that this book provides a much-needed history of monster studies. It voices a powerful call for acceptancing monster studies as a legitimate form of folkloristics, affording us (as a discipline) the opportunity to examine an often-dismissed aspect of the human experience. Finally, as a reviewer, I found this book to be easy to follow, thorough, method-rich, and an overall truly enjoyable read. Coming from all of these different points of view, I consistently arrived at the same conclusion—David Puglia’s North American Monsters: A Contemporary Legend Casebook is a well-curated and enthralling read with extensive (inter)disciplinary and educational possibility.
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[Review length: 913 words • Review posted on March 10, 2023]