What lies beneath

MIDWAY THROUGH MONSTER: THE ED GEIN STORY, the title character stares into the camera and warns: “You shouldn’t be watching this.” He’s talking to two strangers who’ve interrupted him in the bloody af

Guillermo del Toro’s version of Mary Shelley’s myth

On being told that they had been bitten by a venomous snake, most eight-year-olds would panic. Not Nicholas Jubber; he was not terrified but disappointed by a diagnosis that contradicted his own. Nich

Piecing together the inspirations and evolution of Mary Shelley’s famous monster

Taking as many guises as his names, the Prince of Lies turned at times into a man-devouring ogre, a mutant medley of claws, horns and wings, or the brooding rebel that lit the imagination of Romantic painters, as Carla Passino discovers

ONE OF THE MOST GRIMLY FUNNY POEMS OF the past century is Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse,” with its opening salvo about how our parents invariably mess us up. Larkin used a saltier word for “mess,