IntroductionPart 1. Searching for monstersHow Ignorance Made a Monster, Or: Writing the History of Vlad the Impaler without the Use of Sources Leads to 20,000 Impaled TurksUnveiling the Truth through Testimony: The Argentinean Dirty WarFanatics and Absolutists: Communist Monsters in John le Carre’s Cold War FictionPart 2. Desiring the monstrousQueer Race Play: Kinky Sex and the Trauma of RacismAbsolute Beasts? Social Mechanics of Achieved MonstrosityPart 3. Writing monstersUtopian Leprosy: Transforming Gender in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and History in the Strugatsky Brothers’ The Ugly SwansMonstrosity and the Fantastic: The Threats and Promises of Monsters in Tommaso Landolfi’s FictionPart 4. Gazing at monsters‘This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine’: Man's Monstrous Potential in The Tempest and Titus AndronicusPaedophilic Productions and Gothic Performances: Contending with Monstrous IdentityCreeper Bogeyman: Cultural Narratives of Gay as MonstrousFull Metal Abs: The Obscene Spartan Supplement of Liberal Democracy