The Monsters - The Monster Inside

I often regret not having a college degree - not that it would have given me any more money a year - but what I missed learning. I did take some night courses, but nothing that would have given me the depth of a four-year degree, probably one with a major in English/Journalism or History.

For the last forty-odd years I've been trying to make up for those lost four years I never had in my youth. Reading Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler's The Monsters was part of that.

The Hooblers' biography of the "monsters" that gathered at Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816 - a summer of darkness and thunderstorms caused by a volcanic eruption half a world away - was also a biography of the "real" monsters who were conceived during that tumultuous summer: Frankenstein's monster and Vampyre (by John Polidori). "Root cause analysis" is a modern term but this bio certainly is an analysis of the monsters' creative birth.

Frankenstein's monster, ugly on the outside  and rejected by his creator because of that, taught himself by viewing a family secretly through a hole in a wall of the family's home. The monster became a being of knowledge and sympathy but was still ultimately rejected by his creator, much as Mary Shelley was rejected by her father, the philosopher, William Godwin.

Although many traditions have vampire folklore, the monster was usually a peasant. Polidori made him an aristocrat, handsome and seductive - the view that has been handed down for the past 200 years.

By the time I finished The Monsters, I felt I'd had a college course in the Romance Poets. The Hooblers have led me to the biography of Mary Lamb, Polidori's Vamprye and Anne Radcliffe's works - and help me to continue my education.

At the end of The Monsters, the Hooblers write:

At the heart of the book is the mystery of creativity and its consequences, something  that concerned -

   even at times - tormented - all...the people at Villa Diodati. In their out-sized passions, their remarkable talents, their distorted personal lives, their never-satisfied yearning for love -

they were all monsters.

And as I peak through the wall of a college education I know which "monster" I am.