Emerging from darkness, daring to take form and become something more than the Other, monsters stalk these pages, shifting form in true monstrous fashion as they inhabit literature and film, history and parallel communities modelled after our own. They become enmeshed in popular music, run rampant through cities, take androgynous form to rally for their own identities, their own futures, and their own families, and they hold up mirrors while we are caught shattering our sense of Self. Both the past and the future are rich fodder for the evil that monsters do, and from freak show to homunculus to serial killer to cyborg, they remind us that they are never far from sight - and that we cannot look away even if we wish to. Monstrosity from the Inside Out takes as the paradox that monsters are simultaneously impossible and very much a part of what it means to be human.

By challenging masculinity, these poems speak to the rejection of traditional societal values in favor of being yourself.

This book is a work of realistic fiction, based on the factual life conditions of countless individuals to provide reading enlightenment. It is my hope and prayer that after reading this book society will commit to rethinking its look at ex-offenders and what positive impact they can bring to society--- if they are given a fair chance. Danielle grew up confused and feeling abandoned. She moved from place to place; first with her mother, then a group home, then her grandmother, then her father. She grew up feeling that she was unwanted by everyone. Her father and step mother struggled with addiction; her biological mother may have struggled with the same types of issues. She had to live with the guilt of fatal choices she made in her young life which carried through to her adulthood. Danielle struggled with addiction and criminal activity throughout her own life. She spent a large portion of her life in battling the judicial system. She endured physical abuse as a child and as an adult. Death seemed to frequent her life and all those she thought loved and care about her seem to pass away. Her life events seem to finally open her eyes to making a change in her life. When Danielle lost her father she wanted to get high for the first time since her release from prison. She didn't know what to do with her emotions. She sat in the cold hospital emergency room and thought about her life and what using drugs again would mean for her. She had come so far and she didn't want to lose everything she had worked so hard for. Since her release from prison she had gained her family's trust and learned to trust herself. Rather than jump up and give in to her moment of weakness..... she waited.... Danielle discovered that taking away the drugs was only half of her battle. She realized that living life without drugs and criminal activity was the small step to changing her thoughts feelings and actions. She just had to figure out how to make those changes successfully.

Contributions by Novia Shih-Shan Chen, Elizabeth Rae Coody, Keri Crist-Wagner, Sara Durazo-DeMoss, Charlotte Johanne Fabricius, Ayanni C. Hanna, Christina M. Knopf, Tomoko Kuribayashi, Samantha Langsdale, Jeannie Ludlow, Marcela Murillo, Sho Ogawa, Pauline J. Reynolds, Stefanie Snider, J. Richard Stevens, Justin Wigard, Daniel F. Yezbick, and Jing Zhang Monsters seem to be everywhere these days, in popular shows on television, in award-winning novels, and again and again in Hollywood blockbusters. They are figures that lurk in the margins and so, by contrast, help to illuminate the center—the embodiment of abnormality that summons the definition of normalcy by virtue of everything they are not. Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody’s edited volume explores the coding of woman as monstrous and how the monster as dangerously evocative of women/femininity/the female is exacerbated by the intersection of gender with sexuality, race, nationality, and disability. To analyze monstrous women is not only to examine comics, but also to witness how those constructions correspond to women’s real material experiences. Each section takes a critical look at the cultural context surrounding varied monstrous voices: embodiment, maternity, childhood, power, and performance. Featured are essays on such comics as Faith, Monstress, Bitch Planet, and Batgirl and such characters as Harley Quinn and Wonder Woman. This volume probes into the patriarchal contexts wherein men are assumed to be representative of the normative, universal subject, such that women frequently become monsters.

'Good God, where did this wise-beyond-his-years 25-year-old critic's voice come from? His breath of proudly putrefied air is something to behold. Finally, a new Parker Tyler is on the scene. Yep. Mr. Fox is the real thing.' -- John Waters, New York Times This Young Monster is a hallucinatory celebration of artists who raise hell, transform their bodies, anger their elders and show their audience dark, disturbing things. What does it mean to be a freak? Why might we be wise to think of the present as a time of monstrosity? And how does the concept of the monster irradiate our thinking about queerness, disability, children and adolescents? From Twin Peaks to Leigh Bowery, Harmony Korine to Alice in Wonderland, This Young Monster gets high on a whole range of riotous art as its voice and form shape-shift, all in the name of dealing with the strange wonders of what Nabokov once called 'monsterhood'. Ready or not, here they come...

Blue skies, palm trees, and flawless white-sand beaches. Clare Prentiss thinks her new home is paradise, and her brand-new job as security chief at the clinic almost seems too good to be true. It is. But the truth is worse than she could ever imagine. Lurid dreams, erotic obsessions, and twisted fantasies aren't the only things that abruptly invade Clare's life. Is someone really peeping into her windows at night? Yes. Could those grotesque things in the woods possibly be real? Yes. Is Clare being stalked? Yes. But not by anything human. By a monstrosity.