“Some people take a scalpel to the heart of media culture Sady Doyle brings a bone saw, a melon baller, and a machete. In a dark and dangerous world, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers asks women to look to monsters for the ferocity we all need to survive**.** They also speak to the primal threat of a woman who takes back her power. These monsters embody patriarchal fear of women, and illustrate the violence with which men enforce traditionally feminine roles. She illuminates the women who have shaped our nightmares: Serial killer Ed Gein’s “domineering” mother Augusta exorcism casualty Anneliese Michel, who starved herself to death to quell her demons author Mary Shelley, who dreamed her dead child back to life. Sady Doyle, hailed as “smart, funny and fearless” by the Boston Globe, takes readers on a tour of the female dark side, from the biblical Lilith to Dracula’s Lucy Westenra, from the T-Rex in Jurassic Park to the teen witches of The Craft.

Men from Aristotle to Freud have insisted that women are freakish creatures, capable of immense destruction. “Some people take a scalpel to the heart of media culture Sady Doyle brings a bone saw, a melon baller, and a machete.This “witty, engaging analysis” of female monsters in pop culture offers “provocative and incisive” commentary on society’s fear of female rage and power (Soraya Chemaly, author of Rage Becomes Her) The violence we’ve survived can be our guide to what needs to. Our blood holds magic our stories do, too. In a dark and dangerous world, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers asks women to look to monsters for the ferocity we all need to survive. Dead blondes and bad mothers, harlots and abominations, witches at the gate of light and darkness we are the end of the world that was, and the first sign of the world to come, in the age after patriarchy, when monsters rule the earth.

This “witty, engaging analysis” of female monsters in pop culture offers “provocative and incisive” commentary on society’s fear of female rage and power (Soraya Chemaly, author of Rage Becomes Her) What does she tell us about ourselves and how we live today? The Female Monster is alive and well in the pop-cultural imagination.