ABSTRACT
Stories about monsters who threaten to consume, whether they are wolves, witches, sharks, or aliens, continue to be the mainstay of much grotesque-horror ? ction aimed at both children and adults. Monsters such as these act outside cultural and social prohibitions and represent the antithesis of civilized humanity. ) ose who eat badly threaten the coherence of the social order, reveal the precariousness of humankind’s place at the top of the food chain and remind us of the corporeality of our bodies-that our ^esh can be classi? ed as meat just as readily as that of any other animal. Monstrous eaters also remind us of the moral dilemma that eating evokes; even the most everyday and benign act of eating involves aggression and the sacri? ce of another living organism. As Mikhail Bakhtin puts it in Rabelais and His World: “the body . . . swallows, devours, rends the world apart, is enriched and grows at the world’s expense.”2
