FIG. 1: Weekly World News, August 28, 2006

War on Terror: Amending Monsters After 9/11

An Essay

By: Jesse Kavadlo, Maryville University

Posted: 6/1/08

On August 28, 2006, the sadly now-defunct Weekly World News, "The World's Only Reliable Newspaper," as it bills itself, led with this headline: "Vampires Attack U.S. Troops: Army of undead taking over mountains of Afghanistan" (Fig. 1).

The Weekly World News is better known for its placement at the checkout counters at supermarkets and its Bat Boy stories than it is for its geopolitical reportage. And needless to say, the U.S. is not fighting vampires in Afghanistan. Yet the fear that the facetious paper belies is real enough. The Weekly World News, for all its frequent absurdity, understands that, metaphorically, we have been at war with vampires all along. The "New Terror in Middle East" that the subheading warns us of is not new at all, but rather a sensationalized way to describe the terror that is already there. In our current post-September 11, 2001 climate, the new invasion narrative of the terrorist-and, more recently, of the insurgent-follows the conventions of previous monster stories. For the modus operandi of the terrorist is nearly the same as the vampire's: both infiltrate, hide in plain sight, use capital against the capitalist, and eschew the light. The revision of this conflict has a name: the War on Terror.

Despite attempts to change the name-Iraq war, second Gulf war, war on Saddam, war on Islamic radicals, war on militant jihadism, war against Islamofascism-the War on Terror is the title that stuck. And little wonder-it is archetypal, epic, sweeping, poetic, and unassailable. It leaves no room for ambiguity, no place for argument, no possibility for, say, a pro-terror position. Waging something called a War on Terror is understandable: its rhetoric instantly turns nonbelievers into implicit enemy collaborators, renders criticism dangerous if not treasonous, enforces an incontrovertible Manichaeism of "us" against "them," and encourages a desperate times, desperate measures elusion of the law. Best yet, the enemy can remain nameless, amorphous, and disembodied. When we declare war on terror, we declare war on something other than terrorists, as a result turning the enemy into something not just foreign, not just inhuman, but noncorporeal. No wonder the Bush Administration chose the name, then stayed the course.

Yet declaring a War on Terror presents problems as well, not so much in the name but in the implied narrative. The stories nearly always begin with the monster's creation or invitation-frequently, by the would-be hero himself. And the endings are even more troubling: even when the seeming subject of terror is defeated, it nearly always forces the hero, the creator-turned-slayer, into acts of barbarity and conspiracy that eventually rival the monster's own. Or even worse, news of the monster's death is greatly exaggerated, so that, sometimes in the same form, sometimes transformed, the terror will return. By the end, contemporary audiences often sympathize more with the tale's monster than with its hero.

The model monster slayer in the post-Frankenstein, post-Dracula world is no longer the heroic archetype of Beowulf, not since Shelley endowed her monster with feelings and eloquence, and, later, John Gardner's novel turned Grendel from antagonist into leading role. Even the newest on-screen Beowulf (2007) revises the canonical poem by having its hero sleep with Grendel's mother, only to make amends for his transgression later through the visitation of another monster, perhaps the most archetypal of them all, the dragon. For it is the dragon, Christian symbol of evil, that was the allegorical model for monster-slayer Saint George, who, sadly, today stands little chance of being reborn as our own, current George, in a modern world rife with ambiguity. Now that Sean Connery voiced an onscreen dragon, a boy befriended one in Pete's Dragon, and children's fiction like Dragon Rider and Eragon remade dragons in our own likeness, we no longer want them slain at all. Today's readers and moviegoers are ever more likely to sympathize with the monster as with the ostensible protagonist. After Boris Karloff infused his monster with pathos, Anne Rice presented novels from the vampire's point of view, and Francis Ford Coppola romantically revised Dracula into a quasi-Shakespearean tragic hero, we understand that the line between human and monster is precariously permeable. A few exceptions aside, who even identifies with monster slayers, anyway? Who today sympathizes with privileged malcontent Victor Frankenstein over his beautiful, hideous monster, with Keanu Reeves's bewildered Jonathan Harker over Gary Oldman's charismatic, insouciant Dracula? In an uncanny reversal, only a sick person would identify with the callow, ruthless snipers in Night of the Living Dead, blowing up zombies' heads for fun, over the pitiful, inarticulate zombies themselves. Unlike humans, zombies have no choice.

In one of the more thoughtful and successful monster novels to come out of our post-9/11 sensibilities, Max Brooks explores these very tensions in World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. The novel does not reflect its subject matter: it is smart and, after a suspenseful buildup, fast. But what is more, Brooks seems to understand the monster narrative better than the average bestselling writer. True to the word's African origin-the zombie plague is first referred to as "African Rabies"-World War Z presents the ultimate invasion narrative. Yet what starts, in the novel, in China and Africa quickly turns global, for the boundaries of the world are even more permeable than they were in Dracula's day. Here, being a foreign invader carries metaphorical meaning stronger than the xenophobic impulses at work for many of the characters. Zombies make everything they touch foreign, starting with international borders and ending with the border between people and monsters. Through their invasion, zombies estrange their victims from their very humanity, which, as we will see, may be the monster's most frightening lesson for the War on Terror.

By using the form of an "oral history," Brooks can, in monstrous tradition, foreshadow, allude to, and withhold details and plot points until they're at their most poignant and scariest; yet at the same time, this narrative technique allows for multiple points of view. Unlike the typical zombie movie's frequently local scope-this city or suburb, town, or even house-World War Z does not privilege a single point of view. Instead, through the frame of its interviewer, who hears the stories of myriad survivors after the war is over and the humans are left to rebuild their damaged world, it provides international points of view, even down to an Australian astronaut trapped in space, nearly helpless as he sees the world in turmoil below him: "Nobody had a better view of what was happening than us" (255), even as "watching what was happening on Earth … made it almost impossible to have hope" (258).

In that sense, World War Z's tapestry narration resembles Frankenstein's surprisingly modern frame story or Dracula's semi-epistolary form. But the book also resembles these stories in its meaning, for World War Z is not, in the end, about zombies. It is, of course, about people, "the human factor," as the unnamed interviewer tells us right away (1, 3). And so we see a story of struggle and sacrifice. In doing so, the "Zombie War" depicted specifically evokes AIDS, civil war, nuclear strikes, geopolitical shifts, massive displacement, natural disaster, and more. World War Z's ultimate success comes from its use of a fantasy fear, zombie proxy, to frame a thoughtful, political discourse on the real things that people now fear most: a fully realized, literary version of the Weekly World News' vampire attack. Brooks' zombies, in the end, formulate a multifaceted allegory, and a contemporary one. Yet unlike Frankenstein and Dracula, World War Z does not end immediately after the death of the monster, instead providing a lamentation and equivocation fitting a post-9/11 monster story, for its death toll, framed not just after 9/11 but of course World Wars I and II, far exceeds the relatively few casualties of its Victorian counterparts. Its survivors are scarred, scared, and chastened, unable to resume the easy return to family in Dracula's final chapter (the Harkers' marriage and children [326-7]) or the film version of Frankenstein, where the "house of Frankenstein" is toasted as the scheduled marriage is merely interrupted, rather than ruined, by the monster. Instead, in World War Z's post-apocalyptic landscape, one character concludes, "Yeah, we stopped the zombie menace, but we're the ones who let it become a menace in the first place" (334), a sentiment that feels more politically and psychologically fitting than a book about zombies has a right to evoke.

World War Z's inspirations for an allegorical War on Terror are, as I have alluded to, Bram Stoker's Dracula and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Like Brooks' first zombies, Dracula-from Bela Lugosi to Gary Oldman to Sesame Street's The Count-is specifically foreign, an outsider, different. His strength, however, is not bound to the obvious monstrosity that so many Halloween posters emphasize-the pointed ears, pale skin, and elongated fangs that Stoker mentions but that have been exaggerated well beyond the novel's brief description of "a very marked physiognomy": "The mouth, so far as I could see under the heavy mustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with particularly sharp white teeth … His ears were pale and at the tops extremely pointed … The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor" (23-24). Dracula's power, we discover, instead lies in his physical similarity to us: Dracula is a monster, an other, that looks human. But he is not: he is an infiltrating parasite, inhuman and undead, and so he must take that which is most human to us-our very lifeblood-and use it to nourish and sustain himself. By Stoker's late Victorian era, similar in many ways to our own condition in contemporary America, Britain had the ironic fear of, in the words of Stephen D. Arata, "reverse colonization" (462). Even though England had in fact dominated the world, by the end of the nineteenth century it was far more worried about being penetrated and attacked from the inside out by an alien force than it was concerned with its own outwardly fragile global hegemony. And so just as bad as his human appearance is the fact that Dracula can change shape, from wolf to bat to rats and even to mist, so that he can walk among us, hide in plain sight, and blend in.

Finally, and perhaps worst of all, the vampire gains strength when people do not believe in him; indeed, empiricism and scientific skepticism are precisely what allow him to permeate the fabric of British society and thrive. He is safer, more comfortable in cosmopolitan London than in his native Transylvania, since the superstitious peasants there believe in him and recognize him for what he is, while sophisticated urbanites allow him greater safety, since he can walk unrecognized among them until he is ready. London allows him to use the money unsavorily accumulated over the centuries to buy what he needs, sucking England of its blood literally and figuratively, its capital and its capitalists alike. Comparing Dracula to "monopoly capital," Franco Moretti explains that Dracula's "ambition is to subjugate the last vestiges of the liberal era and destroy all forms of economic independence" (433); at the same time, however, "Dracula is thus at once the final product of the bourgeois century and its negation" (434). Like today's terrorists, one group of which used America's permeable borders to slip in and then hijack America's own airplanes to destroy the World Trade Center, our greatest symbol of commerce, Dracula exemplifies capitalism's capacity to be destroyed from within by its very machinations. But the paradox goes further: the attempt to stop Dracula-and, by extension, terrorism now-undermines the same foundations of freedom, tolerance, and secularism of the society it presumes to sustain.

As we see in the novel, Jonathan Harker, Abraham Van Helsing, Jonathan Seward, Quincey Morris, and Arthur Holmwood, with more than a little help from Mina Harker, attempt to stop Dracula. Their authority does not come from science, although Seward and Van Helsing are doctors, or from the law, although Van Helsing is conveniently also a lawyer, but from faith-not in God as much as in the idea of sheer, unmitigated evil. As Van Helsing asks Harker, "Will you not have faith in me?" (150); and later, foreshadowing the X-Files: "My thesis is this: I want you to believe" (172).

Faith must trump reason, for turn-of-the century London's secular relativism and rationalism only help the vampire: "'Ah,'" says Van Helsing, "'it is the fault of our science that wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to believe'" (171). Precisely these same attitudes are under attack in contemporary America for abetting the terrorists today, our own invisible, shape-shifting monsters who, in the argot of the war on terror, infiltrate and use our freedoms and disbelief against us. Foreshadowing contemporary state secrecy, Van Helsing warns that "our toil [to kill the vampire] must be in silence, and our efforts all in secret; for in this enlightened age, when men believe not even what they see, the doubting of wise men will be his [Dracula's] greatest strength" (279). In doing so, Van Helsing denigrates reason and candor as aid to the invader, even as these qualities are the hallmarks of the enlightened society he seeks to protect.

Yet at the same time, the contemporary reader of Dracula, or perhaps a contemporary viewer of Tod Browning's Universal Studios adaptation from 1931, notices not just the monster's power and terror, but what the monster does to its victims. Yes, the vampire's kiss is like a sexually transmitted disease, infecting the victim by turning her into a creature just the same as Dracula. Yet the astute reader or viewer begins to understand that the vampire does not just create monsters by biting and transforming them. He also makes his victims into monsters by making them behave like monsters: they must defy laws, lie, break into private property, and kill. When Van Helsing and the others must destroy the monster that Lucy Westenra, beloved to all the men, has become, the scene in the novel becomes erotically brutal, less reminiscent of monster-slaying than of violent sex and disturbingly similar to images of the vampire's own attack. When Seward first sees the vampiric Lucy, he says, "At that moment the remnant of my love passed into hate and loathing; had she then to be killed, I could have done it with savage delight" (188). But that task falls specifically to Arthur Holmwood, Lucy's fiancé, who consummates their engagement by penetrating Lucy with a stake, in violent simulation of sexual intercourse and an imitation of the vampire's own pointed teeth taken to the source of blood and life, here the heart replacing the throat. Thus, after struck with the hammer and stake,

the Thing in the coffin writhed: and a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions; the sharp white teeth champed together till the lips were cut, and the mouth was smeared with crimson foam. But Arthur never faltered. He looked like a figure of Thor as his untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake, whilst the blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it.

The novel continually suggests that the men need to capture Dracula because of the effect he has on the women closest to them, even as it seems as though the men themselves commit the most egregiously described acts of sexualized violence. In keeping, the men only track down Dracula, who has already fled from them, because Mina Harker has been bitten and her transformation has begun. Yet unlike the male heroes, Mina alone, despite trivializing and patronizing treatment from the men, understands that her burgeoning monstrousness, the fact that she is already nearly a vampire, is itself the key to finding Dracula. And when the men do find him, despite the reader's anticipation of a protracted battle, they dispatch him quickly and brutally, mission accomplished. As Mina narrates, "But, on the instant, came the sweep and flash of Jonathan's great knife. I shrieked as I saw it shear through the throat; whilst at the same moment Mr. Morris's bowie knife plunged into the heart" (325). We accept this violence as heroic because we accept that Dracula is a monster, that he had worse in store for the humans, and that it is the only way.

Yet part of the reason, I suspect, that the story has turned from a potentially forgettable Victorian pulp into an archetypal and particularly (now, thanks to decades of movies) American story, is because of our ambivalence at seeing the monster die, as well as our latent guilt toward his slayers' ultimate cruelty. To kill the monster, they must behave like monsters themselves. This point seems especially apparent in Browning's film: Bela Lugosi's performance is so suave and humanizing that his monster's death resembles xenophobic murder, less good triumphing over evil than a hate crime. Unlike the novel, which at least describes the fight scene even if it is surprisingly brief (quoted above), the film's Harker and Van Helsing sneak up on Dracula in his sleep, an imitation of the same monstrous tactic Dracula himself uses on his own victims. The death is off camera, but the thud of the hammer forcing the stake into a man we had just seen at rest, followed immediately by Lugosi's disturbingly subdued "Oof," seems less cathartic than ambivalent. Dracula's death releases Mina from his spell, but the film's ending-just moments after Dracula's anti-climactic, undignified death-seems mixed as well: Jonathan and Mina ascend the castle's stairs, while Van Helsing, a foreign foil to Dracula, stays behind, in the dark. The foreign ally is left behind to clean up what's left of the equally foreign menace. Only the young and, it seems, native, are allowed to emerge from the crypt into the light.

In the film, and, returning to the novel, it is not the monster that directly makes supposedly good people monstrous, but rather their own attempt to stop the monster that makes them so. The heroes quickly turn fraudulent, as they lie on Lucy Westenra's death certificate (137) and to the realtors (233). They seem heartless, abandoning Renfield to die, just as Dracula does. And, as the movie intimates, their impulses mirror the Count's; Harker hopes that Van Helsing's theory comes true, because he understands how much their actions resemble murder: "the Count's body … will soon after [his death] fall into dust. In such case there would be no evidence against us, in case any suspicion of murder were aroused" (290). Worse, Van Helsing, looking at the dormant female vampires he has come to destroy, fears that they are "so full of life and voluptuous beauty that I shudder as though I have come to do murder" (319), and later, that dispatching them "was butcher work" (320). To stop the monsters, they behave like monsters: violently and heartlessly, in secrecy and subterfuge, as outsiders and then infiltrators themselves. Only Mina seems to notice, and then only for a moment: "Everything that one does seems, no matter how right it may be, to bring on the very thing which is most to be deplored" (226). No wonder Hollywood, unlike Stoker, keeps bringing Dracula back: we want to see our anti-hero Dracula rise from the grave again, of course, but we also, I think, hope to redeem his would-be killers, to give them the chance to subdue the monster heroically rather than resort to his own trade to stop him.

While Harker's work-and his employer's avarice-surely made Dracula's invasion possible, at least Harker did not create Dracula directly. That, of course, is the premise of the other prototypical terror narrative, Frankenstein. Predating Dracula, Mary Shelley's novel gives rise to the classic relationship between the monster and his maker.1 As everyone knows, whether they read the novel or saw the 1931 film or not, scientist Victor Frankenstein created a monster, in the most literal way imaginable: "After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause and generation of life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing life upon lifeless matter" (30); he later reveals that "the dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials …" (32). The reader who comes to the novel after seeing its film incarnations may be surprised by the absence of castles, laboratories, lightning, or many other now-iconic images; the novel goes into surprisingly little detail of the creature's actual construction. Instead, the book suggests that while scientific creation gave the creature life, it did not make him into a monster. Instead, the creature, never named, believes that his abandonment made him horrible, not his frightening (and by today's standards, racialized) appearance: "yellow skin [that] scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries underneath … shriveled complexion … straight black lips" (34). It is the creature's treatment that forced him into deliberate acts of terror, not something intrinsic or essential. In contemporary jargon, it was nurture, not nature. Even the film, which at first seems to take the easy way out by having Frankenstein's assistant accidentally steal a criminal's "degenerate" brain instead of the healthy one, depicts the creature sympathetically. Indeed, the viewer's inadvertent, awkward compassion for the creature, as mutely portrayed by Boris Karloff, remains the film's most striking feature.

If the monster's death in Browning's Dracula is disturbing, in James Whale's Frankenstein film, it is even more so. If Dracula's death resembles a premeditated murder, this creature's is like a lynching, building metaphorically upon the racialized physical description from the novel. In the film, unaccountably Southern-looking men scout the rural countryside with bloodhounds, ropes, and pitchforks, seeking the creature's death less for what he has done-as far as they know, no evidence links the creature to the girl Maria's death-than what he is, or perhaps merely because they are drunk and following the aristocrats' orders. It is the scientist, first in his creation but especially in his treatment of the monster, who seems far more monstrous, despite his normal appearance and profession of best intentions.

As in the novel, Karloff's monster is rejected immediately after his creation. Yet seeing the time span in the movie-from conception to denunciation within seconds-rather than hearing it through Victor's narrative point of view in the novel, the viewer cannot help but feel compassion for the creature. The camera, unlike the novel's narrative lens, functions as an outsider's eye, documenting Frankenstein's pathetic sense of his own victimhood at the expense of his hapless creation. Frankenstein never treats the creature like the infant he is, inexplicably expecting him to understand English and conventional human interactions. When the monster fails, as anyone born minutes ago would, Frankenstein melodramatically turns from him and hides his face. Contrasting actor Colin Clive's self-involved drama as Frankenstein, Boris Karloff's minimalist facial expressions convey a wide range of feelings throughout the film: confused sadness at his rejection; frustration and rage at his torment by Fritz, the hunchbacked lab assistant; lascivious attraction toward Elizabeth, Frankenstein's fiancée; and desperation as the windmill to which he has fled is ignited. Yet for all their eloquence, his gestures can just as easily be read as inarticulate, unfortunately the way in which the film's other characters see them. Much of the novel's power comes from the reader's inability to see the monster, who is indescribably horrible. The film by necessity depicts the monster, and the viewer paradoxically infers both the creature's meanings and his apparent helplessness in expressing them.

The creature's violence in the film thus seems accidental. Yet in the novel, Frankenstein continues to flout and rebuke the creature, until, desperate, the creature turns to violence. If readers had not seen him as a monster before, they may have no choice now. Victor professes the creature's evil from the beginning, referring to the "breathless horror and disgust [that] filled my heart" (34), calling the creature "the demonical corpse to which I had so miserably given life" (35). The creature, on the other hand, escaping his confines and learning to speak and read on his own, argues for a kindly nature that was turned evil by his creator's apathy and rejection; as he tells Frankenstein, "Remember, that I am thy creature: I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Every where I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend" (66). Spurned again by his creator, this time in making the monster a mate, the creature seeks out and murders those closest to his master. At this point the novel turns. Frankenstein becomes the pursuer, and it is the creature who is pursued, until, in the end, they both seem to perish, in ice, together: the reunion, attention, and consummation that the creature craved all along.2

In both Frankenstein and Dracula, the Manichean division between good and evil blurs. A critical part of the terror narrative is the would-be hero's own role in creating or releasing the monster, not just in Frankenstein but continuing as a major plot point and theme of famous monster movies like King Kong, The Silence of the Lambs, Jurassic Park, Alien, and others. Critics have long noted the United States' role in this especially troubling aspect of the terror narrative: in supplying Saddam Hussein to use him against Iran, in training Osama bin Laden to use him against the Soviets in Afghanistan, we created our own monsters, and then released them, only to resort to dangerous tactics ourselves in the attempt to extract justice. It is fitting, then, that Steve Coll's definitive book on the subject, subtitled "The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001," should be called Ghost Wars. Coll's title underscores the venture's clandestine, seemingly ethereal nature, while simultaneously referring to what the "CIA-supplied Afghan rebels called … dukhi, or ghosts" (17). At the same time, however, the title reinforces the way in which our past, monstrously, terrifyingly, haunts our present.

While George W. Bush has been compared, to the point of cliché, to the cowboy, this image has never been fully accurate, despite the Texas twang, cowboy boots, and "Wanted Dead or Alive" posture toward Osama bin Laden. The classic Western hero exhibits reluctance, even sadness, at resorting to violence. The cowboy operates as a liminal frontier figure, one who understands that, his foes vanquished, he has no place in the civilized world. The ride off into the sunset is an ambivalent victory, for the borders of the West are exhausted, and he can never enjoy peace. We, therefore, are more like monster slayers than cowboys. As Richard Devetak suggests, "One way of understanding the Bush doctrine, then, is to read it as a heroic fight against monsters"; Devetak, however, notes the way in which this approach specifically contrasts with those of John Quincy Adams, who, as Devetak puts it, "made explicit reference to the potential risks associated with chasing monsters" (640). But what neither Bush nor even Adams acknowledges is the complex narrative role-the dramaturgical dyad, the archetypal foil, the balancing alter egos-that the hero and monster must together play. Like Frankenstein, we create our own monsters, and then cast them out. Yet as in Dracula, we must also invite our monsters in. Perhaps, though, monster fiction can guide us in life, since monsters, as creatures of the imagination, are inextricably bound to their stories.

One way to think of the impact that 9/11 has had on literature and on contemporary political narratives is through the word "amending," hence this essay's subtitle, "Amending Monsters." I wonder whether the time has come to revise our perceptions of the monster narrative, to accept once and for all that monsters are not only what we fear but, in Freudian fashion, what we wish for. Monsters frighten us, but they also break down the boundaries, and undermine the distinctions between inside and outside, in ways that we find not just entertaining but truthful and compelling. Yet "amending" suggests not just revision but putting back together, as well as making amends or atonement. We may or may not be able to negotiate with terrorists, but we must amend our monsters. We must put them back together again rather than take them apart or reincarnate them, for the monster's body, usually by definition, requires emendation. In amending our monsters, we heal ourselves. And in doing so, we can begin to make amends with terror, a phrase that here does not mean apologize as much as redress and balance, for, as readers, and perhaps even in life, we are always both our monster slayers and our monsters.

Yet as readers, we also create our own monsters, each time we open another narrative of terror for our own pleasure, each time we watch another monster movie, each time we reread a horror classic. As Mary Shelley wrote in her Introduction to the third edition of Frankenstein, "I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper" (173). And it-her monster and her book-certainly has. In one way or another, monsters make monsters of us all. As Nietzsche famously says, "Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster," so we had better tread carefully. We must come to terms with terror, not declare war on it. Not only does terror always win, but we, as a readership, wouldn't have it any other way.

Notes

1. I am using the Norton Critical Edition, which is based on the 1818 text. As Anne K. Mellor discusses, the 1818 edition should be preferred (160). It is worth noting that the 1818 version supports the readings of this essay more than the 1931 edition does.

2. The novel is, of course, ambiguous on this point.

Works Cited

Arata, Stephan. "The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization." Auerbach and Skal. 462-470.

Brooks, Max. World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. New York: Crown, 2006.

Coll, Steve. Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. New York: Penguin, 2004.

Devetak, Richard. "The Gothic scene of international relations: ghosts, monsters, terror and the sublime after September 11." Review of International Studies (2005), 31, 621-643.

Dracula. Dir. Tod Browning. Perf. Bela Lugosi, Helen Chandler, and Edward Van Sloan. Universal Pictures, 1931.

Frankenstein. Dir. James Whale. Perf. Colin Clive, Boris Karloff, and Edward Van Sloan. Universal Pictures, 1931.

Mellor, Ann. "Choosing a Text of Frankenstein to Teach." Hunter. 160-166.

Moretti, Franco. "A Capital Dracula." Auerbach and Skal. 431-444.

Shelly, Mary. Frankenstein. 1818. Norton Critical Edition. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. New York: Norton, 1996.

Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897. Norton Critical edition. Eds. Nina Auerbach and David Skal. New York: Norton, 1997.