At Stake: Monsters and the Rhetoric of Fear in Public Culture

Anyone who watches the evening news is all too familiar with how the word "monster" is used to describe acts of violence. In this book, Edward Ingebretsen sets out to discover what is really at stake when we turn someone into a "monster." The monster, he finds, serves a moralizing function in our culture, making exaggerated examples of particular evildoers in order to reaffirm prevailing standards of behavior and personal conduct.