In very different ways, these two books look at monster tales and supernatural folklore, examining what our most fantastical stories reveal about the human  societies that have invented them. The travel writer Nicholas Jubber, whose last book, The Fairy Tellers: A journey into the secret history of fairy tales (2022), covered similar territory, travels to the countries associated with each of the monsters he studies. He also participates in the local rituals that keep their legends alive, from a festival dedicated to Bolster the Giant in Cornwall to raucous celebrations of the rougarou (a kind of werewolf) in Louisiana.

Intriguingly, Jubber hints that monster legends have helped him in a “long-standing battle with [his] own demon within”. These wild tales have an existential importance for him, as they do for many of the people he encounters on his global monster. By contrast, Karl Bell, a professor of social and cultural history takes a more detached, academic approach, presenting meticulous research into the folklore that has bound maritime and coastal communities on both sides of the Atlantic.

The earliest monsters were often also regarded as gods – beings that inspired devotion as well as fear. At sea, Bell points out, this provided ancient mariners with a way of “psychologizing” the weather, which was viewed as a manifestation of divine mood. Although belief in these gods had disappeared by the eighteenth century, Christian mariners continued to interpret storms as punishment for their misdemeanours –and, like many workers involved in dangerous occupations, they were a superstitious crowd. Throughout the pre-steamship era, drawing blood on New Year’s Day was thought to increase sailors’ fortunes for the months ahead (although some took this as a cosmic justification for beating their wives). Human cauls were bought for good luck as late as the Second World War. Bad omens were also common. Anyone who found themselves overboard, especially off Shetland, was unlikely to be saved by a fellow mariner: it was believed that if the sea was deprived of the life of the drowning man, it would later compensate by claiming that of his rescuer. Sailors also thought that it was bad luck to have women on board, but, paradoxically, considered it a good sign if a baby was born at sea.

Jubber suggests that monsters and gods slowly separated as human beings’ confidence in their ability to master nature increased; over time, gods became more human-like, more amenable to negotiation through prayer. But monsters stayed monstrous because they “had always reflected our uneasy relationship with the wild places around us, our fear of what might lurk in the dark”, as well as in the recesses of our psyches. “Shapeshifters”, writes Jubber, “speak to the wildness in all of us.” The survival of monsters in the popular imagination is also owed to the cultural importance of storytelling and symbolism, and to our masochistic love of being frightened.

Jubber seeks out fear and darkness. He spends the night in an abandoned water mill near the Serbian village of Zarožje, the  of one of the earliest vampire legends. (The first began circulating in the 1670s, and was of Czech origin.) In a tale dating from the nineteenth century, Sava Savanović was said to be on the rampage in Zarožje, until one villager was brave enough to open his coffin, douse him with holy water and ram a stake into his chest. During a sleepless night in Savanović’s lair, Jubber never really believes that a vampire is lurking in the dark, but the “sounds of nature scraped on [his] nerves” and he couldn’t shake the feeling that something might happen. “You think you’re rational”, he writes, “but your incredulity will be tested when you’re alone in the dark.”

The vampire is one of the few monsters featured in these works to have made the transition from localized folklore to world literature. Jubber claims that John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) – the first vampire tale to be published in English – and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) created the “Byronic, upper-class, sexually predatory vampire trope”, establishing vampires as the “snobs of monsterland”.

Polidori, who briefly worked as Lord Byron’s physician, also played a supporting role in the creation of the world’s most famous literary monster. In the summer of 1816, he joined Byron and the young writer Mary Godwin, as well as Godwin’s future husband, the poet Percy Shelley, and her stepsister Claire Clairmont, on a trip to Lake Geneva. As this literary quintet sheltered in their villa from the awful weather, Byron suggested that they each write a ghost story. An elaborated version of Mary’s contribution was published two years later as Frankenstein – a novel that, according to Jubber  “showed we don’t need the gods or nature to punish us with evil spirits” because “we’re pretty damn good at tormenting ourselves”. But Frankenstein’s creature isn’t just frightening: he is sad and lonely, yearning for love and acceptance. As an outcast, a victim of human hubris, he encourages pity  compassion, despite his murderous rampages.

Many of our monsters and mythical creations have this dual nature – of being scary but relatable, or masking a lethal nature under an alluring exterior. Take the mermaid, a nautical trope as old as human civilization. Bell claims that Atargatis, an ancient Syrian fertility goddess, “offers one of the earliest divine models for the mermaid”, which for eighteenth-century mariners “personified the association between the feminine and the marine environment, being understood as simultaneously alluring and dangerous to a predominantly male gaze”.

It was said that sailors unable to resist a mermaid’s beauty or seductive song were lured into the depths, never to return. Mermaids could also curse towns, control the weather and bring both good and bad luck to ships. But they weren’t pure folklore: experienced sailors reported sightings well into the nineteenth century. In 1823, six fishermen in the Shetlandsclaimed to have caught a mermaid three feet long, with the body of a human

and a head like a monkey’s, covered with stiff bristles. Sceptics reasoned that it was probably some kind of seal, but the fishermen were adamant that they could tell the difference. Still, there was presumably no danger of plunging after such a creature in the hope of otherworldly pleasures: “The ‘real’ mermaid”, Bell notes drolly, “frequently failed to live up to the beautiful idea of myth.

Unlike Scottish mermaids, which seem to have become extinct, Mexico’s most iconic ghost is very much alive. According to one version of the legend, La Llorona (“The Wailing Woman”) is the tortured spirit of a native Mexican woman named La Malinche, who had two children with a Spanish conquistador named Hernan Cortes, as well as assisting him in the seizure of Tenochtitlan (as Mexico City was then called) from the Aztecs in 1521. When Cortes refused to marry her, she drowned their children in jealous rage before drowning herself. Her grief-stricken moan is usually described as the most chilling aspect of sightings. During Day of the Dead celebrations in Tepoztlan, Jubber visits a local man, Hilario, who says he saw La Llorona in his mid-twenties –a terrifying experience that sent him running to his parents’ bed. Hilario’s wife, Liliana, tells Jubber that La Llorona often walks the high street – a claim that might seem laughable to many modern readers. But these aren’t the only supposed sightings he hears of on his travels throughout Mexico.

This interpretation of the La Llorona legend has persisted partly because of its historical significance. Many Mexicans believe that La Malinche “betrayed” her nation by aiding its Spanish conquerors. Yet she is also regarded as the mother of the mestizo, or mixed, Mexican nation that exists today. Jubber suggests that her tale also admits of a feminist interpretation for the twenty-first century, dramatizing “the damage inflicted on women by the callous men who use and discard them – and [offering] them a chance for revenge”. Like all good legends, that of La Llorona has survived because of its susceptibility to many layered interpretations, as well as its undiminished ability to frighten and fascinate.

In Morocco, Jubber tracks the djinn – -shifting spirits with the capacity for good or evil, of whom the most feared is Aicha Kandicha, a spectral being as central to Arabic culture as La Llorona is to Mexico’s. Like a mythical mermaid (as opposed to a real one), she is supposed to lure men in with her beauty, only then to reveal her huge fangs, bristling legs and cloven feet. People can also be possessed by the djinn. The result is a state of inner turmoil called maskuna, for which traditional remedies include shrines, clairvoyants, burning herbs and ritual trances. Jubber interviews a Muslim psychologist who practises in Bradford, many of whose patients express concerns about the djinn; “in about five per cent of the cases”, he says, “we suspect there is a paranormal influence”. Those are deferred to a raqi, an

expert in the Qur’an and unseen spirits.

This might raise eyebrows among nonreligious readers sceptical of “alternative” treatments; but Jubber empathizes with a Moroccan woman who tells him she was possessed by a djinn for two decades before freeing herself through ritual trance:

I thought of [the] ... times I had felt

ashamed to vocalise the darkness inside

me … Yes, if there was a ritual that might

solve it all, if it was endorsed or

encouraged by the people around me, then

… why not?

On Mount Zerhoun, in the desert north of Meknes, he witnesses a fringe celebration, disapproved of by many orthodox Muslims, in which a young man slashes at his face with a knife until his hair is a “matted black gel”. Such behaviour would be considered to require the urgent attention of a psychiatrist in most European countries; but within his community, the ritual’s bloodied protagonist is thought to have achieved a state of trance known as hal. Such examples push against the limits of cultural relativism, testing our prejudices. For Jubber, that’s travel at its best: “Is there any point in travelling if we limit ourselves to the world we understand?”

Bell’s research is presented with all the scholarly hallmarks one would expect, including caveats about the reliability of sources and references to other academics; but it lacks the living human context that gives Jubber’s book edge and vitality. Both authors, however, write insightfully about the Anthropocene; popularized in the early 2000s, the term designates the geological epoch defined by humanity’s impact. Now, writes Bell, “we have become the monsters”. Humans are the twenty-first-century, land-dwelling equivalent of the Kraken, “guzzling up” the oceans’ resources. Jubber takes a similar line, arguing that modern blockbuster monsters such as Godzilla –created in Japan in the mid-1950s, after the horrors of the atomic bomb had been revealed –reflect guilt and anxiety about humanity’s power. AI, though not technically a monster, can be seen as a digital Frankenstein –a creation of humanity with the potential to destroy its creator. In May 2023, a manifesto on “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI”, was signed by more than 350 of the world’s leading scientists, as well as the CEOs of Open AI and Google DeepMind

Despite these apocalyptic pronouncements, both writers end on a note of optimism. The explosion in popularity of cinematic monsters over the past few decades, says Nicholas Jubber, has brought people together again; in a secular, scientific age, monster stories meet the need for transcendental myths once satisfied by religion. For Karl Bell, ancient mariners’ tales and practices can “teach us how to confront our own environmental fears as we attempt to navigate the turbulent currents of an uncertain future”. In the meantime, any sceptics are challenged to spend a night in that Serbian mill.