For fun, here are some titles I'm consulting for my 'ecomonstrous' reading of Lafferty's bioregional fiction (i.e. mostly his stories set in Oklahoma or the Southwest—or that are flavoured that way even if taking place, say, on another planet, e.g. 'Smoe and the Implicit Clay'—and which feature the nonhuman). The major areas of research are basically the U.S. (South)West (mainly through Native American Studies and Frontier Tall Tales), Ecocriticism (mainly through Object-Oriented Ontology and New Materialism), and Ecotheology (mainly through contemporary ecological readings of Thomas Aquinas and Hans Urs von Balthasar, though also through some theologians engaging New Materialism and the concept of the Anthropocene). As to the Monsters and Monstrous element, I feel like I'm largely forging my own way here. Monster Studies is still a fairly nascent field and it tends to deal almost exclusively with culture (race, gender, class, etc.) and very rarely with ecology or nonhumans. And even with all these conceptual parameters I am, of course, only mapping a small portion of Lafferty's erudite brain. At my lowest times I feel overwhelmed, out of my depth, and/or off on a goose chase of implausibility. (If it's a mud goose, then maybe I'm okay. See Lafferty's story 'Boomer Flats'.) At my highest times, I'm absolutely soaring with the joy of learning about all of these fields and far more so with the joy of reading Lafferty's fiction closely and feeling as if perhaps a few things are just possibly unlocking and connecting a bit.
Below is a tiny fraction of the bibliography, and of course doesn't touch upon all the journal articles that go into it as well. But it's a quick colourful distraction. Here's hoping I can make a coherent argument out of what might appear to be all these disparate materials:
