In Stoker's original narrative the vampire hunter VanHelsing, unlike so many modern action heroes, is not out simply to avenge himself against Dracula andhis minions; he actually wants to redeem their lost and tortured souls. Even in visages that do not showup in mirrors, Van Helsing is capable of recgnizing a shared humanity and, indeed, offeeling some pityfor their frightful plight. And at the end of Stoker's novel, Mina Harper, who has more than enoughreason to despise this foul creature of the underworld and to savor his destruction, describes Dracula'sdeath with a note of unstrained sympathy. "I shall be glad as long as I live that even in that moment offinal dissolution, there was in the face a look of peace, such as I never could have imagined restedthere." Stoker's vampire is not so much murdered as forgiven. These stories, again and again, remind us that in biology and myth monsters are disfiguredversions of ourselves, fun-house mirrors of our own frail and sometimes monstrous humanity. Monsterstories, then, by confronting us with these disfigured embodiments of ourselves, invite us to reflect onour own humanity, and, indeed, our inhumanity. In a way that is not so very different from Luke'sparable of the Good Samaritan, these Gothic tales challenge us to recognize the humanity of the beastand to acknowledge the beastliness of our own inhumanity. Indeed, the best of them are remindersand warnings about the ways in which we make and become such beasts. Victor Hugo's 1831 classic The Hunchback of Notre Dame (so pathetically sanitized in Disney'srecent animated version) may be one of the best modern monster stories we have. Even the name ofthe misshapen bell ringer, Quasimodo, tells us that this brutish creature is but "half-formed," and, likeFrankenstein's beast, Hugo's disfigured monster seems cruelly fashioned of mismatched parts, hisbody a tortured terrain, his face a terrifying visage. As one critic writes: N...
