The Ecomonstrous

He welcomed them as one of the rarest and heartiest foods ever. They entered into him. Ah, the salt and the sulphur of them would stand him well in his crux hour when it came. By eating its brains, he would always have a certain mastery over this enemy.

Advanced Lafferty today. Reading The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Monsters (2025) has me thinking again about Petersen’s idea of the ecomonstrous, which Petersen writes about in his dissertation. Lafferty fans who want to think with Lafferty should read it closely. Related to this, some time ago I wrote about the devil-hydra in Past Master. The diagram at the end of this post outlines how Petersen approaches the question of the monstrous. Where I disagree with him will probably be unsurprising: we ought to not abandon the tradition of monsters in the theological and Catholic folk imagination because Lafferty uses this as his seedbed.

This comes out most clearly in the diagram in Section II (“Core Nature of the Monster”), especially in Petersen’s characterization of the ecomonstrous as “uncategorisable exorbitance” with no inherent moral valence. He proposes that readers might shift from “Monster = Evil” to “Monster = Too Much,” treating the monster as a neutral force of excess or glut. I agree that this kind of figure does appear in Lafferty. It is the sublimity of Leviathan in the Book of Job. What Peterson does well is identify a dialectical moment, but something essential is lost or becomes one-sided when the conceptual limit of the term is amoral weirdness. The ecomonstrous in Lafferty does not freeze itself as a concept once it is pushed into actual narrative functions in Lafferty, that is, when we ask, what is the monstrous doing?

The Feral Lands offer a good example of where Petersen’s ideas are genuinely illuminating. His videos on Past Master (1968) show how strong his close reading can be. We enter the Feal Lands as an ecomonstrous space, but soon the Feral Lands are defined by verticality—their mountain peaks and watery depths, which are spiritual imagery, the primordial waters of Genesis 1:2 and the heights of Genesis 8:4. If we think of the Feral Lands as they first appear to the characters, Petersen’s notion of the ecomonstrous has real power. When we turn to the devil-hydra, however, the concept risks reinforcing what Lafferty so often critiques as modern cultural amnesia. Plainly put, most of Lafferty’s monsters invite a clear binary moral judgment. Most of his real monsters are, in fact, devils, with the consequences being that the ecomonstrous is rarely free of the gravity well of the ethicomonstrous. It is within that moral field that Lafferty’s creatures take shape, their forms becoming legible through theological absolutes rather than through morally neutral environmental forces. It how they reveal themes to Thomas More in total darkness when the Nine tell him about the back of the tapestry, the conspiracy behind Astrobe’s politics. The book has two conspiracies: the false one of Proctor, Foreman, and Kingmaker, and the real one of the Nine. Lafferty uses ecomonstrous aporia apocalyptically, as a way of recovering a renewed ethicomonstrous perception, which takes place in Chapter 10.

I would also want to question Section V (“Implications”), particularly Devourment and Sympoiesis. I think Petersen tends to see consumption in Lafferty as metaphysically non-hostile and creative. It is necessary for the New Materialist flow of the world. For other, unrelated reasons, Ferguson sees it similarly.

Consider eating in Lafferty, an obsessive topic for him. Eating is a major Lafferty theme, a complicated image, and it is a source of ideas for Lafferty. He wrote exceptionally well about it. On the moral side, we can imagine a y-axis. It ranges from the maw of Ouden (a little higher up are the threats made by Snuffles) to the Eucharistic meal that happens right off stage after the end of Arrive at Easterwine (1971). Aurelia (1982) is a novel of homilies organized around meals.

There is also a satirical x-axis. It can be farcical, as in the Big Breakfast of Space Chantey (1968). It can be biting, as in “Oh, Those Trepidatious Eyes!” It can be an acid bath, as in “Pleasures and Palaces.” The great example of consumption as something that is not transformative and only minimally satirical is, of course, Ouden, followed by the thieving bears. Their consumption is annihilative. Alongside the consumption of the devil-hydra’s brains in Past Master and the idea of using Thomas More as “bait,” their attacks are instances of violent spiritual warfare and domination, not ecological aporia. The point seems to be that the dialectic has moved beyond ecomonstrous aporia. Thomas More himself says so in the devil-hydra scene. What has happened is allegory, Lafferty’s Thomas More belongs more Middle Ages than the early Renaissance. The antagonist is the Henry VIII of Lafferty’s Cobbett, Chesterton, and Belloc. Past Master is as much an assault on Protestantism as it is on utopia, the two being connected for Lafferty, something that has gone unrecognized. But the point of allegories is that they convey ethical information. They disclose, not withdraw. It is the medieval view that nature itself is a book to be read. When Petersen looks at nature in Lafferty, he sees a sacramental ontology rooted in biodiversity and divine plenitude connected on one side to OOO. I agree with him about plenitude, but then he freezes nature as vibrancy-tenebrity. I also see something sacramental, but it looks a little different to me because it does not end there. It becomes a specific literary variation of the dogmatic sacrament of Transubstantiation, grotesque counterfuguration, used as a weapon to master the enemy. It is post-aporetic. Aporia is preliminary. Revelation is final.