What is it that you’re a professor of, exactly?

I finished up Rick Yancey’s The Monstrumologist over the weekend. It impressed the hell out of me. Certainly, it’s some of the best horror literature to come out this year, and as 2009 has seen new books from Sarah Langan, Dan Simmons, and Stephen King, that’s no mean feat.

I’m curious to see if it’ll end up being as successful as it deserves to be. Technically, it’s a YA novel, and I have trouble imagining it showing up in too many middle school libraries or Scholastic bookorders.¹ The Monstrumologist is an unequivocally R-rated book, both for the extremity of its violence and the darkness of its themes; sizable chunks of dialogue are devoted to discussions of eugenics and Nietzche’s Übermensch (timely topics in the book’s late 1800s academic setting). I don’t doubt for a second kids’ ability to handle the material, but I have slightly less faith in the adults who have a hand in choosing what they get to read. I worked in a bookstore for a few years with a children’s section run by an “expert” who seemed to be under the impression that anyone under the age of twenty-one was mentally and emotionally retarded.

Maybe I’m wrong. I readily admit to having no idea what’s going on in the world of YA literature. Maybe it’s more sophisticated than when I was a kid. The last thing I read that qualified as belonging to the genre was that Deathly Hallows book, which was pretty fucking dumb.

I’m getting sidetracked here. What I wanted to talk about was something that I realized while reading this book, the title character of which is a professor of (…have you guessed it?…) monstrumology, a little-known, little-respected field of study, well, monsters. Or, as Yancey’s website puts it:

What I realized is this: I fucking love monster hunters in tweed suits. Love ‘em. Possibly my favorite horror sub-genre, ranking even higher than zombie apacolypse. (Possibly. Don’t quote me.) I’ve put a fair amount of thought into it since then, and I’m not sure I can explain my affection. It might have something to do with getting to see the frail-but-intelligent getting to be the heroes for once. Perhaps I just like the idea of old-timey academia, monsters or no. Or maybe I just have a fondness for earth-toned suits.

Here are a few of the badassical bookworms I’ve dug on over the years:

Abraham Van Helsing

As far as I know, the man who took on Count Dracula is the original. In most movie versions, he’s portrayed as a vampire expert, but in Bram Stoker’s book, he’s an expert in just about everything (a category into which vampirism happens to fall).

Next to Dracula himself, I don’t know if there’s any other character in literature who has shown up in as many adaptations and sequels across all mediums as this guy. The worst, by far, would have to be the Hugh Jackman movie, in which V.H. is written as being some kind of cowboy/priest/angel…maybe a werewolf? Some shit. I don’t really remember. On a personal note, I saw Van Helsing in a theater in Prague, a city that appears in the movie at one point. Hugh Jackman looks out upon its unmistakable medieval skyline and breaths, “Budapest.”

Perhaps not the best, but at least my favorite, would be Peter Cushing in the Hammer series of Dracula films. Nowhere else is he portrayed as being so dapper, to the point of dandihood. The man’s just as likely to wear a tweed three-piece as he is to wear a purple crushed velvet suit worthy of Chuck Bass. You know he’s in dire straights when his immaculately slicked-back hair gets messy. A little.

It is unclear why the good people at Hammer Film Productions felt compelled to change his first name from “Abraham” to “J.”

Miskatonic University’s head librarian is one of the few H.P. Lovecraft characters to ever accomplish something other than going crazy or getting squished, and for this reason, some critics consider “The Dunwich Horror” to be one of the Mythos’s weaker entries. It’s true that it’s got a different adventure-to-horror ratio than much of Lovecraft’s writing, but the idea that this somehow makes it inferior is garbage. That there is an actual range of emotional and dramatic possibilities throughout the Cthulhu Mythos is exactly why writers are still dabbling in it decades later.

Rupert Giles

The father figure/mentor of Buffy the Vampire Slayer certainly fits the academic monster hunter trope: tweedy attire, glasses, stuffy accent, works in a library. As tends to be the case with the show’s characters, though, Giles is written against type. As we eventually learn, he dropped out of Oxford at twenty-one to play in a rock band and practice black magic (which I guess leaves me a little confused as to what kind of credentialing he has that allows him to work at a California public high school). As tends to be the case with the show’s characters’ histories, it all comes back to bite him and the  people he cares about.

^–

¹ Do these still exist? Am I showing my age?