'Fascinating, enthralling and definitely enchanting''
Chris Packham
Enchanted Creatures:
Our Monsters and Their Meanings
Natalie Lawrence
2024, Weidenfeld & Nicholson
The hydra rears its many heads in a flurry of teeth and poisonous fumes. The cyborg lays waste to humanity with a ruthless, expressionless stare.
From ancient mythology to modern science fiction, we have had to confront the monsters that lurk in the depths of our collective imagination. They embody our anxieties and our irrational terrors, giving form to what we don't wish to know or understand. For millennia, monsters have helped us to manage the extraordinary complexity of our minds and to deal with the challenges of being human.
In Enchanted Creatures, Natalie Lawrence delves into 15,000 years of imaginary beasts and uncovers the other-worldly natural history that has evolved with our deepest fears and fascinations.
Join Lawrence on a tour or prehistoric cave monsters, serpentine hybrids, deep-sea leviathans and fire-breathing Kaiju. Discover how this monstrous menagerie has shaped our minds, our societies and how we see our place in nature.
Praise for Enchanted Creatures
‘In this fascinating book, Natalie Lawrence takes us on a riveting tour of the monsters which have long occupied human minds and cultures, and which reveal a huge amount about who we are and where we have come from.’
MERLIN SHELDRAKE
Author of Entangled Life
One of the ‘Best Books of 2024’
BBC WILDLIFE
‘Game of Thrones meets the Natural History Museum meets Grimm
fairytales. Fascinating, enthralling and definitely enchanting.’
CHRIS PACKHAM
Naturalist and television presenter
‘Natalie Lawrence’s deliciously readable Enchanted Creatures is food for even the most rational mind and I absolutely devoured it.’
AMY-JANE BEER
Author of The Flow
‘A thrilling, compellingly readable account of the biology of the creatures that squirm, crawl, gallop and prowl through your subconscious. Read it to know what you really are.’
CHARLES FOSTER
Author of Being Animal, Being Human and Cry of the Wild
‘Enchanted Creatures is a thrilling, wide-ranging and profound exploration into the things of darkness that humanity would do well to acknowledge as parts of itself.’
CASPAR HENDERSON
Author of The Book of Barely Imagined Beings and A Book of Noises
‘In her powerful debut, Lawrence surfaces imaginative and real creatures, and beautifully clarifies their importance to us. In so doing, she confronts us with existential anxieties that resonate in an age of climate grief, but also she also shows us the hope to be found glinting between the scales.’
MELANIE CHALLENGER
Author of How to be Animal
‘Ms. Lawrence is a zestful writer. Enchanted Creatures
vividly conjures fanciful terrors such as dragons, werewolves, bull-men,
and snake-women.’
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
'Beautifully written, completely engaging and dazzlingly wide-ranging, Enchanted Creatures is underpinned by great intellectual brilliance and a masterful command of detail and theory.’
JULIA LOVELL
Author of Maoism and The Opium War
‘An exhilarating romp through the bestiary of history by one of our finest guides through the creatural world. Ranging deftly from the Mesopotamian Epic of Creation to Godzilla reboots and therianthropic raves, Lawrence—like Joseph Campbell and Marina Warner before her—reveals the monstrous in the human and the humanity waiting to be rediscovered in the monster’s eyes.’
HUNTER DUKES
Editor of The Public Domain Review
‘Wide-ranging and full of passion for the pernicious and downright peculiar monsters we have dreamed up over thousands of years. It's scary what the mind can conjure.’
DAISY DUNN
Author of In The Shadow of Vesuvius and The Missing Thread
‘There is still an appetite for the fantastical, as this excellent and accessible book demonstrates’
THE DAILY MAIL