Monsters, Law, Crime, composed of essays written by prominent U.S. and international experts in Law, Criminology, Sociology, Anthropology, Communication, and Film explores and updates contemporary discussions of the emergent and evolving fronts of monster theory in relation to cutting-edge research on law and crime, and of a Gothic Criminology.

Monsters, Law, Crime, an edited collection composed of essays written by prominent U.S. and international experts in Law, Criminology, Sociology, Anthropology, Communication and Film, constitutes a rigorous attempt to explore fertile interdisciplinary inquiries into “monsters” and “monster-talk,” and law and crime. This edited collection explores and updates contemporary discussions of the emergent and evolving frontiers of monster theory in relation to cutting-edge research on law and crime as extensions of a Gothic Criminology. This theoretical framework was initially developed by Caroline Joan “Kay” S. Picart, a Philosophy and Film professor turned Attorney and Law professor, and Cecil Greek, a Sociologist (Picart and Greek 2008). Picart and Greek proposed a Gothic Criminology to analyze the fertile synapses connecting the “real” and the “reel” in the flow of Gothic metaphors and narratives that abound around criminological phenomena that populate not only popular culture but also academic and public policy discourses. Picart's edited collection adapts the framework to focus predominantly on law and the social sciences.

Introduction: Explorations in Gothic Criminology: Ruminating on Monsters, Law, and Crime — Caroline Joan 'Kay' S. Picart

I. Of Myths and Monsters

Chapter One: “Deeds of Treachery and Violence and Lust and Cruelty”: Revisiting Freud’s Primal Crimes in Aboriginal Central Australia — John Morton

Chapter Two: Criminal Anthropology, Fabulism, and Criminology’s Unacknowledged Teratological Lineage — Jon Frauley

Chapter Three: Vampire Fictions and the Conflation of Violent Criminality with Real Vampirism: A Practical Overview — John Edgar Browning and DJ Williams

II. Contagion, Monstrosity, Ethics

Chapter Four: A Double-Tap “Lilith Moral Panic” in Israel, 2014: How Labeling Others as “Monsters” Conceals Their Victimization — Orit Kamir

Chapter Five: Evil-By-Proxy and Everyday Monsters: Towards a Moral Sociology for Overcoming the Passive Observation of Evil —Michael Hviid Jacobsen

Chapter Six: Monstering Madness: Criminal Lunatics in Broadmoor 1863–1913— Lucy Williams, Sandra Walklate, and Barry Godfrey

III. Monsters in Reel/Real Life

Chapter Seven: The Purge, or Law of the Universal Monstrous — Matthew Sorrento

Chapter Eight: Contrasting Depictions of Medical Serial Killers; Doctors Pétiot and Shipman from the Manic to the Mundane — Steve Greenfield

Chapter Nine: The Redactasaurus Chronicles: Fear, Consumption and Graffiti in Capital City — Deborah Landry

IV. Law, War and Monstrous Discourses

Chapter Ten: Human Trafficking, Empathy for Victims, the Tool of Eradication —David “D.W.” Duke

Chapter Eleven: Visualizing Monsters and Just Wars in Legal and Public Analyses of Eastwood’s American Sniper — Marouf Hasian Jr.

Chapter Twelve: Monstrous Discourses, Jihadi Cool, and Emergent Counter-Terrorist Narratives: The Case of Ahmad Khan Rahami (a.k.a. Ahmad Rahimi) and the 2016 New York/New Jersey Bombings — Caroline Joan “Kay” S. Picart

Postscript: Gothic Criminology’s Evolving Frontiers — Cecil Greek