Monsters, Surekha Davies suggests, are rarely just creatures hiding in the dark. They are ideas. They appear whenever societies draw a line around what they consider normal and push everything unfamiliar, uncomfortable or threatening to the other side.
That provocative argument sits at the heart of Humans: A Monstrous History, a wide-ranging exploration of how human beings have used monsters, myths, science and systems of classification to define themselves. Davies is less interested in cataloguing vampires, werewolves or mythical beasts than in asking a more unsettling question: who gets labelled abnormal, dangerous or less than fully human—and who gets to decide?
For Davies, monsters are “category breakers”: beings or people who do not fit neatly into established definitions. A werewolf is disturbing not simply because it has teeth, but because it collapses the distinction between human and animal. Frankenstein’s creature similarly unsettles because it exists between life and death, one body and another. Such figures expose the limits of the categories humans create to organise the world.
But the book quickly moves beyond fictional monsters. Davies uses what she calls “monster-making” or “monstrification” to examine the much more consequential process by which societies identify certain people and communities as outside the accepted norm. These labels, she argues, often tell us more about those doing the labelling than about those being labelled.
This is where Humans: A Monstrous History becomes much more than a history of strange creatures.
Davies moves across centuries and cultures to show how ideas of normality have been shaped by religion, empire, science, race, power and social hierarchy. The book links historical acts of exclusion with contemporary debates over human rights, labour, wealth, health, technology and climate justice. Its central claim is that many modern assumptions about who counts as a person and what counts as “natural” carry traces of much older ways of thinking.
One particularly revealing section takes the reader to colonial Mexico, where Indigenous understandings of humans, animals and the natural world collided with Catholic ideas brought by Spanish colonisers. Davies recounts accounts of shapeshifters and traditions in which the boundaries between humans, animals, plants, rocks and other parts of the natural world could be porous rather than fixed. European religious authorities, unable or unwilling to accommodate such beliefs, instead interpreted them through categories such as superstition, heathenism and even the work of the devil.
The episode illustrates one of the book’s most compelling ideas: definitions that appear natural or universal within one society may look arbitrary from another cultural framework. The boundary separating human from animal, nature or the supernatural has never been as fixed as people sometimes assume.
Davies also examines how science itself has participated in creating and dismantling such categories. Ancient Greek and Roman thinkers, for instance, wrote about supposedly “monstrous peoples” inhabiting distant lands. Environment, geography and bodily difference were used to explain why entire communities might supposedly depart from accepted human norms.
What makes the book engaging is Davies’ ability to move between mythology, historical archives, science and contemporary culture without treating monsters merely as curiosities. Her subject is ultimately power: the power to classify, name, include and exclude.
The origins of the book are themselves revealing. Davies traces the idea back to a 2014 astrobiology conference at the Library of Congress, where discussions focused on possible extraterrestrial pathogens and hostile aliens. She found herself wondering about something more human: how would people react psychologically, culturally and religiously if extraterrestrial life were actually discovered? Her larger question was whether humanity could prepare for encounters with the unknown without first learning to deal more constructively with difference among ourselves.
That concern gives the book unusual contemporary relevance.
Towards the end of the introduction, Davies turns from old monsters to new anxieties. She raises questions about corporations, surveillance and artificial intelligence, warning of a future in which human beings themselves could increasingly be treated as inconvenient or obsolete. The monster lurking at the edge of the future, she suggests, may not be an alien or supernatural creature at all—it may be humanity confronting the consequences of its own systems and prejudices.
Humans: A Monstrous History therefore works on two levels. It is an entertaining journey through monsters and the strange ideas humanity has created over thousands of years, but it is also an examination of the politics behind the word “normal”.
Its most important argument is also its most uncomfortable: whenever people create monsters, they are simultaneously defining themselves.
And history shows that the line between the two has never been particularly secure.
Davies, a historian of science and author of the prizewinning Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters, brings considerable expertise to this intersection of history, science and cultural imagination.
