Updated: October 11, 2025

The history of monsters in fiction is long. For instance, Grendel in the epic poem Beowulf is an archetypal monster: deformed, brutal, and with enormous strength, he raids a human settlement nightly to slay and feed on his victims. The modern literary monster has its roots in examples such as the monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the vampire in Bram Stoker's Dracula.