"The Grotesque Menageries of Greg Simkins"

By Nancy Hightower:

Monsters are tricky things. We love them, fear them, need them, despise them when they invade our dreams a little too often. Their ubiquitous and yet marginalized presence in our lives rests on the contradictory emotions elicited by such creatures. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes “The monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety and fantasy (ataractic or incendiary), giving them life and uncanny independence” (4).  This “uncanny independence” means that we are not as in control of the monster as we would like to be, that often they can crawl, jump, or slither through the linguistic fence of Otherness and into our world.  Cohen states that “[t]hrough the body of the monster fantasies of aggression, domination, and inversion are allowed safe expression in a clearly delimited and permanently liminal space.  Read more....