In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Semiconscious, Roland Deschain doesn’t know if he is dreaming or drowning. Suddenly he is shocked by icy cold water washing all the way up his legs to his gun belt. Thus alerted, his first clear thought is to save his guns and shells, though he’s peripherally aware of a dangerous monstrosity off to his right. Roland lies on the shore of the Western Sea, at the western edge of the world. The Cyclopean Mountains run parallel to the beach. Roland, the last gunslinger, is on a quest to reach the Dark Tower—a quest that matters more to him than people, love, pain, or life. Roland is a cross between Jesus Christ, Captain Ahab, and Harrison Ford. The situation in which he finds himself that I have just described is from the opening scene of The Drawing of the Three, published in 1987 as the second volume of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series; Roland is King’s antihero. The approaching danger, at first glance some eight yards away, is four feet long and one foot high and weighs about seventy pounds. It fixes him with stalked eyes and begins to make noises that sound human; sounds like “plaintive even desperate questions.” It asks: “Did‑a‑chick? Dum‑a‑chum? Dad‑a‑cham? Ded‑a‑check?”1 It is and it isn’t a lobster, though it is more like a lobster than anything else. King calls it a “lobstrosity.” But before Roland can attend to it, he has to get beyond the tide to protect his gun shells. He hears the roar as a huge wave approaches,and he sees the monstrous creature raise its claws against the breaker in the defiant, belligerent way that lobsters have. Roland is reminded of the socalled honor stance with which boxers open a match. Too weak and numb to stand, propelling himself in much the way the lobstrosity moves, by clawing into the sand, Roland creeps away from the crashing wave. Moving faster than expected,the creature suddenly attacks him, Man-Eating Monsters 68 , i , l o b s t e r clamping down on and tearing away the first and second fingers of Roland’s right hand. When the gunslinger manages to stand, the creature tears into his calf. He kicks it, and the animal takes off his boot and most of his big toe. Left-handed, Roland painfully removes his gun, aims, and pulls the trigger—but the damp shells don’t fire. At last, as the lobstrosity fulfills its compulsion to rise in honor of or in protest against another roaring wave, Roland wrenches a large rock from its sandy bed, raises it, and crashes it down on the creature. The first blow crushes the animal’s back. Its subsequent death throes, plus the gunslinger’s grinding the creature beneath his remaining boot heel and his methodical stomping on the shattered, scattered remains are horrific. So is Roland’s raging pain, later compounded by poison from the lobstrosity ’s bites, which bring on long fevers and “shuffles” in and out of consciousness.2 That was just the first of the battalions of lobstrosities that lurk in this monster-horror fantasy: lobster things that resemble scorpions and are poisonous, though instead of stingers they have jagged, edged beaks. Unafraid of humans, they confront and challenge them with plaintive, inquiring voices. The oddity of their speech seems a rhythmic, musical refrain, and paradoxically it is so unlobsterlike as to be funny. The creatures do not emerge with the tides but come out of the waves as the sun sets and darkness approaches. Each time a wave breaks, they all raise their claws. And is that not as peculiar and pathetic as their imploring“Did-a-chicks”? Even without literary modification, lobsters are exceedingly strange. When do they become monsters? When they are supersized . When they talk. When they cross borders between species. When they are deformed or in some other way step beyond the characteristics that we recognize and expect them to have. As noted in the previous chapter, teratology—the Greek word for the study of monsters or marvels—is the study of abnormalities in medicine and biology. In mythology, literature, and history, teratology refers to the study of marvels, prodigies, monsters, and other wondrous plants and animals. Nathan Bailey’s 1731 edition of The Universal Etymological English Dictionary defines teratology as “when bold writers, fond of the sublime, intermix something [3.135.246.193] Project MUSE (2024...

Share