Michael Mark Chemers is Professor and Chair of the Department of Performance, Play & Design at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA; the author of The Monster in Theatre History: This Thing of Darkness (Routledge, 2018); the co-editor, with Analola Santana, of Monsters in Performance: Essays on the Aesthetics of Disqualification (Routledge, 2022) and The Figure of the Monster in Global Theatre (Routledge, 2024), and with Ekaterina Trachsel and Gerald Siegmund of Staging Monstrous Bodies (Routledge, 2025); and the founding Director of the UCSC Center for Monster Studies.

Analola Santana is Associate Professor of Theater at Dartmouth College, USA. She is the author of Teatro y Cultura de Masas: Encuentros y Debates (2010) and Freak Performances: Dissidence in Latin American Theatre (2018), which considers the significance of theatrical practices that use the "freak" as a medium to explore the continuing effects of colonialism on Latin American identity. She works as a professional dramaturg and is a company member of Mexico's famed Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes.

Introduction - Wicked Prisms: Monstrosity as Vor-Schein

PART I. THE MONSTER AS SIGNAL

1. The Monstrous Body is a Discursive Body

2. "There Be Dragons...Awashed in the New World"

3. The Monstrous-Feminine in Performances by Florentina Holzinger

4. Many Monsters in One: Ipi Zombi? And Post-Apartheid South African Sociophonics

5. Who is the Monster? Naming the Monster as Performative Act in Koreeda Hirozaku's Monster (2023)

PART II. LOOKING THROUGH THE MONSTER'S EYES

6. "Here Comes the Hurricane": Confronting Environmental Monstrosity through Comedic Performance

7. Haunting the Genre: The Transformative Power of Immersive Performance in Haunted Attractions

8. Walk Toward The Sunset: Epidemic as Test in Melungeon Narrative

9. Revenge of the Monster Queer: The Cosmic Horror and Eldritch Liberation of Drag

10. Dancing the Monstrous: Manifestations of Female Sexuality in Horror

PART III. THE MONSTER IS US

11. Fearing the Monster Within: Abjection and Empathy in The Whale

12. Dreams of Carcosa: The Utopian Space of Weird Horror and Theatre or a Reparative Reading of The King in Yellow

13. Monstrous Embodiments: The Artistic and Political Potential of Drag Practices in Buenos Aires

14. Vultures and Mud: The Transformational Ecologies of Ochún Ibú Kolé

15. Teratological Becoming(s): Exploring Black Religion Through Monstrous Performance