Hello and welcome to The Monster & The Child, where childhood studies and monster studies collide! I am Dr. Kathleen Kellett, and this is part two of the Ask Me Anything. Answering your very good, very in-depth, detailed questions took more time than I realized it was going to, so got broken up into two parts, and I hope that you enjoy part two.

All right. Um, morgantornetta8599 asks, “Do you have a list of theory books you would recommend so I can get them all from the library?” So theory is really broad, and so I’m just going to tell you some of the main sort of theoretical underpinnings I used for my dissertation. Um, that seems like a good enough way to narrow things down. Um, so one of the things I talked about a lot in my dissertation was based in affect theory, which is kind of the study of and theorization around embodied emotions – so sort of the actual like biological states of being that we experience when we experience emotion – and then the cultural interpretation thereof and the effects of both of those things. And so you can look at that specifically in literature but also in lots of other sort of categories of life. So if you’re looking for that sort of idea in children’s literature specifically, we’ve got Affect, Emotion, and Children’s Literature: Representation and Socialization in Texts for Children and Young Adults, and that’s an edited collection edited by Bullen, Maruzi, and Smith. And then another one that I used a lot in my dissertation was Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Um, highly recommend that, and just kind of highly recommend Ahmed in general because she rules.

Then I did a lot of work on metaphor. So George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s 1980 text, Metaphors We Live By, it’s really foundational. That is just really interesting for learning some of the ways that metaphor shapes how we think about many certain concepts. You think of metaphor just as like a literary device, but it’s so like cognitively foundational to the way that we conceptualize ideas, and I think that’s really neat. Um, and obviously as someone working with monstrosity which is all metaphor, that was really important to learn about. Um, then we also have some overlap of metaphor with the emotional stuff I was just talking about. So we have Zoltan Kövecses, who is a theorist who writes a lot about that topic. His – I used his book Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling. And then for the political rhetoric side of things, I used Jonathan Charteris-Black’s text, Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor.

And then finally, for the actual just monster stuff, if you’re looking for a big old edited collection – a bunch of them, that’s that kind of top shelf of this bookshelf back here. We have Mittman and Dendle’s edited collection of The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous. That’s – that’s just a fun one. It’s got lots of history of monsters, sort of different cultural contexts, and then more contemporary stuff, as well. Um, you’ve got Kristeva, of course – Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Um, extremely foundational to a lot of people who have done monster studies since, including Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. A book on economic theory and monsters that I absolutely love is David McNally’s Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires, and Global Capitalism. Then we have W. Scott Poole, who’s one of my favorite just academic authors, and he does the – the sort of writing for a broader audience. I think his writing is super accessible but also super well researched. Um, I really love his books Satan in America: The Devil We Know, as well as Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and The Haunting. Highly recommend both of those. And you absolutely don’t need to be any kind of academic to read them – just enjoy some good non-fiction. And then, I also really love Ebony Elizabeth Thomas’s book, The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games. She does a really interesting like call in response with Cohen – with Cohen’s seven theses, where she kind of looks at things from the monster’s point of view, and she does that in the context of writing about the – the Dark Other – the Dark Other trope in Western fantasy, and how this sort of racialized darkness is the stand-in for like the villain and the monster, and what to do about all of that, especially in, you know, contemporary fantasy. Um, so yeah, I will have, you know, all of those in a work sited in the description if you want to check those out. If you’re interested in the topics that I talk about, I think any and all of them would be of interest to you.

On the topic of research, staydazzling89 asks, “I’d love to know your research process for these videos. Like how do you find the sources or literature in particular? I’d love to know because I’ve been wanting to do further reading on these subjects and topics.” Um, so, you can check out those books that I just mentioned. You know, jumping into this YouTube channel was after many years of doing a lot of research on these topics. So, a lot of the research, I like already kind of have in the bank, as it were. But I also am, you know, always finding new sources for my essays. We love JSTOR. We love JSTOR in this household. You can get 100 free articles per month, which is amazing. Project MUSE is also a great journal database for a lot of humanities scholarship. They don’t have – they don’t have quite the generosity of a JSTOR, but they do have an open access database. I’ll also link that in the description. Um, and, you know, Google Scholar. Google like – Google isn’t as useful as it used to be, but Google Scholar can still turn up some good stuff. But like I said, I’ve already – I’ve already done a lot of research in this area. So research that I’ve done for my dissertation, for conference papers that I’ve done, I’m definitely dipping into those. A great way to find other things, once you sort of have done a little bit of research, is to look into the works cited of other pieces that you found interesting, because then you get to find out what they used and you can do a whole rabbit trail of interesting scholarship that way. And also the works cited of Wikipedia articles, frankly, frequently a fairly good place to start. And also I just love a Wikipedia black hole. I’m down a like four day – I’m on day four of a Wikipedia black hole about like death gods and mythology, and it’s been very fun. So, you know, research doesn’t have to be this big sort of scary, onerous undertaking. You can just start just googling around stuff that interests you, and then once you find stuff, you can see what sort of reputable scholarship exists on it.

To that end, if you don’t have access to like a university’s database of academic sources, which I currently don’t because I am not currently working at one, if you look up authors’ work on ResearchGate specifically, because often you can find author’s contact information on there – and if you can’t, you can if they’re affiliated with a university, you can usually find them on the university site – pretty much anyone will send you their full text if you ask. If you reach out to a scholar and say like, hey, I’m really interested in reading your article, but I don’t have, you know, a university access to that journal, um, and I don’t have the like 40 bucks or whatever to spend on a single article, would you be interested in sending it over to me so I can read it? Basically, we’ll all say yes, because we don’t get paid for – for the articles we publish. Um, if we get published in an academic journal, we’re – we have not been paid for that. If we’re up published in an edited collection, we’re not paid for that, either. So like yeah, we’ll definitely send you our work. We want people to read it. So if it looks like something is blocked you, if you have a way to reach out to the author, absolutely do so. And as long as, you know, it’s a current email and they’re currently working and looking at their university email, then you are very likely to get that that article sent to you.

Um, on that topic, redblack9618 asks, “Have you written anything we can read? Any published papers?” Yes, I have three published papers. The first two are about His Dark Materials, because, again, that was what my master’s thesis was about. So in 2018, through University of Toronto Quarterly, which did a special edition on monster studies, I published an article called “Beyond the Collapse of Meaning: Narratives of Monstrosity in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.” And that was also the title of my thesis, so that article is very much a highly condensed version of the thesis itself. And then in 2022, um, a book called Containing Childhood: Space and Identity in Children’s Literature came out. This is an edited collection that I am in, and that also has a chapter about His Dark Materials from me, although that one actually wound up having a lot less to do with the thesis in terms of where the paper took me. But that one is called “The Open Gates of Eden: Uncontainable Adolescence in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.” And then last year, 2024, an article that I wrote was published in Magistra Iadertina, which is actually a Croatian academic journal, because the University of Zagreb actually has a big children’s literature program, and I participated in a conference that they held in 2023, and then they sort of solicited those papers from us – from the attendees to publish. Um, luckily the paper could also be in English, because I do not speak Croatian. So my paper for that was “Monster Book Club: Engaging with Youth Political Knowledges through Young Adult Literature,” and that was taken from my dissertation research. S if any of you are interested in those, I would be more than happy to send them to you. Um, you can always send me a message. You can email me at themonsterandthechild@gmail, and I would be glad to send anyone who wants the text of those.

Okay. And then we have a long list of questions from johnkelly7725. So, thank you for all of those. The first one is any thoughts on Moomin – possibly about having monster children without the scary elements? Um, it’s on the list. Um, “the list” is probably a few months long now, so it might take a little while, but I have always wanted to get more into the work of Tove Jansson, because as a person, she absolutely ruled. I honestly don’t have much familiarity with Moomin stuff yet, but I am very excited to. Um, on the more immediate list, I do have a video that’s going to come up about exploring children’s fears through monsters in animated movies and picture books, so that idea of monster children without the scary elements is coming. That will probably be in like February-ish based on my current schedule.

Okay, next one is what are some good monster kids’ books for different ages? Would love your idea on what kids should read. Kids should read whatever they want. It’s important to recognize that they always have lots of different tastes and interests, but if they’re interested in monsters, then I certainly have some things that I also love. Um, and some of these will be like showing my age because they’re things from my own childhood. The first like creepy story that I can remember loving was the book Taily-Po: A Ghost Story by Joanna C. Galdone. I remember getting in trouble for kissing the library book, because my teacher said that that was germy. But I just really liked the book as a little kid. And I was a really very easily frightened child, so no one could have predicted when I was little that I would go into monster studies. But that was probably the first one where I was like, “This is spooky in a way that I really enjoy.” And, um, going way back to those early picture books, um, Monster at the End of This Book, absolute classic, and one that I will be talking about in that video that I just mentioned about sort of learning how to manage fears through monsters.

For middle grade, starting with sort of easier readers, loved a Bunnicula story when I was in elementary school. Um, obviously I just did a whole video on Animorphs. You know, quite the undertaking, but extremely worth it. I love the Bartimaeus trilogy by Jonathan Stroud, which I would say is like upper middle grade. Uh, in the first one, the main child character is 11, 12, so I’d say like certainly around that age, could read and enjoy. But they’re pretty hardcore in terms of like emotional content, but they’re also very funny. Bartimaeus is a djinn who on occasion gets enslaved by human magicians, and he does not like that. So he is sort of compelled to do the will of this child called Nathaniel, but he has a lot to say about it in the meantime. But Bartimaeus is such a compelling monster character. Um, he’s – he’s really sad. Like he’s so funny – and like if you like funny footnotes, like this book has it in spades. But long, long ago, he had a friendship with a magician who summoned him, and that is typically not the experience of spirits being summoned by magicians. Usually, it’s just enslavement. So like, he knows that humanity can be good sometimes, but it so infrequently is in his experience. And the sort of like angry hope that maybe the people he encounters could be better – this sort of hope in spite of himself is just so compelling to me. Great nonhuman point of view character.

Obviously His Dark Materials. I wrote my whole master’s thesis on them. Um, you know, they’re probably not the first thing people think of when they think of monsters, but if you read any of my work on them, you will see that I think that monsters as like a category of narrative – monster story –  is sort of all over there in terms of heroes versus villains, what is considered natural versus unnatural. I think there’s a lot of cool stuff there. The Last Unicorn is a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful book. That basically from like middle school on up, anyone could read. Um, the prose is just like – every couple sentences you’ll just get a series of words that like strikes you through the heart and you have to put the book down and just stare at the wall for a bit. And then also like the Red Bull is an incredibly powerful, compelling, thought-provoking, frightening, dark monster figure.

And then we move into YA, which is my real bread and butter. Um, so, most of the YA that I have worked with in terms of monstrosity isn’t like straight up horror. It’s more fantasy and sci-fi. So the titles that I’m going to list may not – you may think like, oh, it doesn’t have like “a monster” in it. Um, but I think that they deal with themes of monstrosity. So we have got Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows. Probably don’t have to say much about them because they’re so popular, but I love them. The work of Rachel Hartman – the Seraphina duology as well as Tess of the Road. They’re also on that shelf behind me. I haven’t read In the Serpent’s Wake yet, which is the follow-up book to Tess of the Road, but Tess of the Road is incredible. I think the Seraphina duology is also very good and definitely has lots of monster stuff in it because the main character is a half dragon, which is an identity she is trying to hide. But Tess of the Road I feel like just levels things up and is like really thought-provoking, has a great character at the forefront, and I highly recommend it. The Dread Nation duology by Justina Ireland – that’s post-Civil War zombies and the Black girls who are recruited to fight them. So obviously, there’s a ton of stuff there, and that also has really excellent point of view characters. Um, the Feverwake duology by Victoria Lee. That’s also – you know, the throughline of all of these is like characters who I find really complex and messy and compelling. And Feverwake has that in spades. That is a magical pandemic, that if you survive it, which you probably won’t, but if you do, then you come out the other end with magical powers. And it’s about refugees, politics, manipulation – in politics and also manipulation of young people from untrustworthy adults. Um, so a lot of good stuff there. Um, one of my favorite YA authors is Patrick Ness. The Chaos Walking series has great monster stuff in it, as well as his book Release. I think all of his books have great stuff in it, but those are two – if you’re really looking for good monster stuff, go into those. Hal Shrieve’s Out of Salem – it’s a book I’ve actually mentioned on here a couple of times. You’ve got a nonbinary zombie and a lesbian teen werewolf who become friends and try to find a way to stop the zombie’s decomposition before it’s too late. And it all takes place in ’90s Oregon. Really cool like alternate history in that one. And then a book that I actually didn’t love when I first read it, but then I used for my dissertation study and the responses that I got from the teen readers actually made me reconsider my reaction to the book – and that would be The Taking of Jake Livingston by Ryan Douglass. It’s a – it’s a short book, and I think that one of the things that threw me off was like that it felt kind of abrupt. Um, but it has to do with a very unwilling teenage medium who is also like one of the only Black kids in school and one of the only gay kids – so he’s dealing with a lot – who then gets possessed by the ghost of a – or the ghost of a school shooter tries to start possessing him. So those are some of my monster recommendations.

All right. Next question. Did you ever think of releasing these as podcasts, too? I had not, but do you think it’s a good idea? I’ve had people recently tell me that I should also do shorter stuff on TikTok as well. The scholarship stuff I kind of know how to do. The social media stuff: still very new to me. So, if you think podcast platforms would be a good avenue – or the Tik Tok thing – let me know.

Are you seeing overall themes on how we view kid monsters over time? Example, more protagonists, nicer, less complex. And then where do you think it’s going? Okay, so this is just going to be very vibes based and not like research founded. Okay, so definitely over time with portrayals of monsters and not just like child monsters, monsters have been taking on more of that protagonist role and less of just being the automatic antagonist. Um, obviously, Mary Shelley, as always, was a little bit more ahead of her time than everyone else in having that sort of sympathetic monster. But if you look at like the trajectory of vampires, for example, you very much go from like hardcore villains to more complex often protagonists. Um, I hope that in terms of like nicer or less complex portrayals – I hope we’re not going to go less complex, but I do feel like I may know why you asked that. So, I do truly believe that people will always be writing really interesting, complex child monsters. Um, but I do think the question points to some didactic trends and flattening of sort of moral content for children or about children that I’m hoping we can sort of steer away from in the future. One of the things that I always keep in mind is something that my best friend told me once, which is I hate when monsters don’t get to act like monsters. If you’re going to write monsters, keep it weird, keep it messy. You know, don’t just be like, “Oh, they’re such a monster, but actually they’re secretly the good guy, and there’s nothing actually that wrong with them.” Because that’s not challenging, and that’s not necessarily interesting. You know, I’m, as you – as you know, pretty much always on the monster’s side if I can be, but that doesn’t mean that I want them to be like the unalloyed good guy. If I wanted that, then I wouldn’t be interested in monsters. I also think that a lot of children’s literature, including like children’s fantasy – I think it’s a cross – a cross-genre thing – but there is this sort of strain of didacticism and moral simplicity that can be overplayed. And that can sort of reveal how powerful the ideas and the constructs of like childhood innocence are. Because a lot of times, even if you’re reading something – even if I’m reading something I agree with politically – this happens all the time. Even if I’m reading like a middle-grade or a YA where the values, the message, I am 100% on board wit,h sometimes they just portray these ideas in such an obvious like holding up a megaphone, not really letting the reader think for themselves, preachy sort of way, that I feel like that’s just upholding childhood innocence but in a different hat. You know, it’s like we’re progressive, but we still have to tell the kids what to think. Do we? Do we have to do that? Um, I think that portrayals of child characters as well as fiction for child readers or child viewers, should engage in complexity, especially if we’re going to dip into monstrosity, and should respect children enough to allow them access to that.

Now, I don’t think this is just like a writer thing. I’m not trying to like say like writers these days or anything like that, because I think it’s also extremely – and probably primarily – an issue of publishing and an issue of studios. So, whatever medium we’re looking at, if we’re looking at books or film or TV, you know, people are trying to put out a lot of commodifiable, digestible content to be consumed, as opposed to more complex storytelling. And that’s a bummer. That’s a real bummer. But I think that there are always going to be storytellers who push against that, who are trying to tell the more complex stories, and that’s just what we need to seek out.

So in terms of where I think it’s going, certainly where I hope it’s going is to explore things like children’s rights through some of these stories. So, back to the question before about, you know, children’s liberation or children’s rights. I think we can have some stories about like kids going a little monstrous in reaction to not having the freedom and autonomy that people deserve. I think that would be cool to see.

What have we been missing from a US perspective – other ideas from other countries? That’s also a really good question. Um, my biases are very US-based, because a lot of my research is about monstrosity and American teens and American politics. So that is just straight up what I know the most about. I am very much like contemporary, national in my national context kind of stuff. But with that said, yes, definitely there is a ton of stuff we can learn about monstrosity, about childhood, by looking from authors and thinkers from other points of view. One thing that I think is really interesting is looking at monstrosity as not just an antagonistic thing. So way back in my like Monsters 101 videos that I did kind of first thing on this channel, I talked about how often in Western storytelling, monstrosity is the antagonist to humanity, and those categories are defined against one another, and generally violently against one another. But that is not true in all cultural contexts. One really cool article that will be in the work cited below is the article “Cave Men, Luminoids and Dragons: Monstrous Creatures Mediating Relationships between People and Country in Aboriginal Northern Australia” by Joanne Thurman. That is a really cool article that I taught in my monsters class two years ago that really challenges this sort of Western view of monstrosity being always bad, always something to be avoided, and always something that is not able to be incorporated into a broader worldview. Like monstrosity is often like the undefinable Other in like Western contexts that is something that we have to get rid of push away because it doesn’t fit our categories. And Thurman talks about how in Aboriginal Northern Australian contexts, like, yes, monstrosity exists as a category, and it is a category of like not the other things. So not human, not animal, not land, etc., but some sort of mix or otherness beyond those categories. And so it is a category to be like wary of, but it’s not necessarily a category that is divorced from the rest of reality, nor is it something that is automatically going to be bad to the people who encounter it. Um, it can even often be helpful. So I think that’s really cool. Finding those different contexts of what monstrosity can mean I think can really challenge us to sort of check our assumptions and check the ideas that we like didn’t even realize we were bringing to the table.

Um, I also have taught some Indigenous North American monster figures in some of my classes, including Deer Woman or Deer Lady from Native American contexts. The episode of the TV show Reservation Dogs called “Deer Lady” is basically a standalone episode, and I really recommend everyone watch it. It’s incredible. Obviously, geographically, that is based in what is now the US, but culturally, you know, certainly distinct. And that also has a monstrous figure as a sort of regulatory figure and, you know, certainly antagonistic to some people, but antagonistic to people who are harming community. So therefore, the figure that is monstrous and scary and capable of violence beyond what humans are can also very much be on the side of “good” humans.

And then also like all monsters – and this is something that Jeffrey Jerome Cohen says – all monsters are so specific to their time and place and they’ll always tell you something about the cultures from which they originate. So, like I’ve talked about a little bit on this channel about some Japanese monster stories like Godzilla or like Dark Water, and the monsters in those tell us a lot about Japanese national contexts and history. Um and that’s going to be true of any monster you find from, you know, anywhere and any time. So yeah, if you’re interested in studying monsters, definitely seek out as many different types of monsters, as many different cultural examples of monstrosity as you can.

All right, next. Um, what does the concept of Halloween do to kids literally taking on monster forms for themselves, and how has that changed over time? I don’t know much about Halloween in terms of like a scholarly point of view, but I do love it, unsurprisingly. I think it’s great. I think that giving children – giving anyone – any opportunity to try out different identities is always a good thing, is always an exciting time of exploration, and a frequently very healthy way of play acting different emotions, emotional states, thinking about different points of view. I think that we should all dress up as different things more often, and I think that’s a good creative outlet for our brains. I can’t speak to really how it’s changed over time. Again, that’s just not my area of expertise. But the question has piqued my interest, so that research topic may be going on the list.

You talk a lot about the media given to kids, but any good insights on the response from kids? What is influencing kids and what didn’t make an impact? Okay, so as I have mentioned, that is pretty central to the research I did for my dissertation. So that just regards teenagers, because that’s what I did for my dissertation study. Ad it was only twelve kids, so I was not trying to produce anything with like generalizable results. I was treating these participants as theorists in their own right. Like I was citing them like I was citing the other scholars, putting them in conversation with each other, not trying to say like this is how teenagers think. It’s like this is what this specific teenager thinks. But as theorists, I can say that, in that experience, the young people were very much paying attention to aesthetics and craft when they were reading. That has to be there first before they engage with any thematic material. So if something’s just like not well written or the plot doesn’t make sense, then, you know, whatever grand message or metaphor you are trying to put in there, they’re not going to pay that much attention to it, because they’ll be like, I didn’t like the characters, or there were a bunch of plot twists that didn’t go anywhere. Um, they also sort of collectively found it very annoying when teenage characters didn’t act realistically, and then when they were like preoccupied with things that don’t make sense. For example, if they’re like only thinking about their potential romance when the stakes of the story are like the end of the world. You know, I had multiple participants be like, how – how dumb do authors think we are? Like how – like we care about the stuff that matters. Like if we’re imminently going to die, we’re not being like, “Oh, but my crush.” Like so they don’t like when they’re treated as just sort of those stereotypes of a young person.

And one thing that I definitely noticed in reading books with them is that they would frequently relate things, even from kind of the distance of fantasy, to school settings and home settings, because those are the settings that we allow kids to be in. So for example, we read the book Pet by Akwaeke Emezi, which is a weird little book that has this sort of utopian setting, but one in which a lot of the bad stuff from the previous dystopia that they overthrew is kind of hidden from the kids. And it’s done so in a way that like when something bad is happening, the kids don’t have access to the knowledge to be able to understand it. So when we were reading that um a lot of the participants would talk about like, oh, this is like how bad sex ed is, how much they don’t tell us, how much they focus on abstinence and pretend if they don’t give us information then it can’t possibly hurt us. So there’s a lot of that sort of relation of the ideas in different sort of fantastical settings to experiences that they have in school settings and in home settings.

Another thing I’ll say on that point is that, you know, YA has such a reputation of like getting rid of all the adults – especially YA fantasy – so that like everyone’s an orphan, the adults are all completely absent, so that the kids can actually go on whatever adventure they need to go on. And in my own writing, I’ve been certainly guilty of that, as well. Um, but a lot of my participants would frequently talk about the adult characters in the book and the relationships they had with the teen protagonists, because those relationships are so important to actual young people. Like they are living with adult guardians. They learn from adult teachers. So yeah, definitely a call for me as just a writer to pay more attention to those adult characters in children’s literature, as well.

And then finally, what’s something that you haven’t seen in literature but want to? So, I mentioned before that I would love to see sort of those ideas about children’s rights being incorporated into some more storytelling for children. But I also just want, you know – this is not something that I’ve never seen before, thankfully – but I always just want more mess, more complexity, more just contradictory, difficult characters. I want people to let me get mad at them. I want authors to let me disagree with characters and trust that I’ll still be compelled by them. Back to my story of that favorite teacher from sixth grade, one of the books we read in that class was The Master Puppeteer by Katherine Patterson, which is a sort of mystery story of like a Robin Hood figure within a bunraku puppet theater in Japan. And the main character is a young apprentice boy who is now apprenticing at the theater. And at one point our teacher was like, “Oh, isn’t – isn’t Jiro being so arrogant in this chapter?” And a bunch of us were like, “Oh, but – but we like him. He’s the main character. We like Jiro.” And Mrs. Ivey was like, “Yeah, you can still like a character and think they have flaws and think that they can make mistakes and are doing things that you don’t agree with.” And my 12-year-old mind was just blown wide open. Like, I was like, “This is a whole new way to enjoy books. This is a whole new way.” Like, I can read this and be like, “Oh, he’s being a little shit.” And that’s great, and I’m enjoying that. Um, yeah. So, always want to see more of that.

And then the final question, going back to morgantornetta was, is there a classic monster or interpretation of a classic monster that you feel most drawn to? The answer to that question is always going to be werewolves. Werewolves are my automatic fave – although I can be – because of that, can be a little picky when it comes to depictions of werewolves, if I think that they live up to the potential or not. But I just think it’s like kind of the perfect monster. It’s human and not, both more than human and less than human, just collapsing of categories. It’s body stuff, it’s mind stuff, it’s, you know, complete otherness while still having one foot in the human, so you always have like that that human core of a character, and what the monster stuff does to them. Just love a good werewolf.

All right, so those were the questions I received. So again, thank you very much for watching this AMA. My links to my Patreon are in the description. I’ve got the works cited all up there, as well. And I am really excited to see you very soon for more monstrous food for thought.

Fiction recommendations:

• The Monster at the End of This Book, by Jon Stone (1971)
• The Tailypo: A Ghost Story, by Paul and Joanna Galdone (1984)
• Bunnicula: A Rabbit Tale of Mystery, by Deborah and James Howe (1979)
• Animorphs, by K.A. Applegate (1996-2001)
• The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle (1968)
• The Bartimaeus Trilogy, by Jonathan Stroud (2003-2005)
• His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman (1995-2000)
• Six of Crows duology, by Leigh Bardugo (2015-2016)
• Seraphina duology and Tess of the Road, by Rachel Hartman (2012-2015, 2018)
• Dread Nation duology, by Justina Ireland (2018-2020)
• Feverwake duology, by Victoria Lee (2019-2020)
• Chaos Walking triology, by Patrick Ness (2008-2010)
• Release, by Patrick Ness (2017)
• Out of Salem, by Hal Schrieve (2019)
• The Taking of Jake Livingston, by Ryan Douglass (2021)
• Reservation Dogs, showrunner Sterlin Harjo (2021-2023)

My published papers:

• Kellett, Kathleen. (2024). Monster Book Club: Engaging with youth political knowledges through young adult literature. Magistra Iadertina, 19(2), 35-62.
• Kellett, Kathleen. (2022). The Open Gates of Eden: Uncontainable Adolescence in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. In Containing Childhood: Space and Identity in Children’s Literature (Ed. D. Russell). University Press of Mississippi.
• Kellett, Kathleen. (2018). Beyond the Collapse of Meaning: Narratives of Monstrosity in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. University of Toronto Quarterly, Special Issue, Monster Studies, 87(1), 158-175.

References/recommendations:

• Ahmed, S. (2014). The cultural politics of emotion, Second edition. Edinburgh University Press.
• Bullen, E., K. Moruzi, & M.J. Smith (Eds.). (2018). Affect, Emotion, and Children’s Literature: Representation and Socialisation in Texts for Children and Young Adults. Routledge.
• Charteris-Black, J. (2005). Politicians and rhetoric: the persuasive power of metaphor. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Kövecses, Z. (2000). Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling. Cambridge University Press.
• Kristeva, J. (1982). Approaching Abjection. In Powers of Horror: An Essay of Abjection (Trans. L.S. Roudiez). Columbia University Press.
• Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. The University of Chicago Press.
• McNally, D. (2011). Monsters of the market: Zombies, vampires, and global capitalism. Brill.
• Mittman, A.S., & Dendle, P.J. (Eds.). (2012). The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous. Routledge.
• Poole, W.S. (2009). Satan in America: The Devil We Know. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
• Poole, W.S. (2011). Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting. Baylor University Press.
• Thomas, E. (2019). The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games. New York University Press.
• Thurman, J. (2014). Cave Men, Luminoids, and Dragons: Monstrous Creatures Mediating Relationships between People and Country in Aboriginal Northern Australia. In Musharbash, Y., Presterudstuen, G.H. (Eds), Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond, 25-38. Palgrave Macmillan.