1. In fact, as we shall see much later in the book, this type of story was superbly caricatured even at the time, in W. S. Gilbert’s parody of the melodramatic ‘sensation novels’ of the 1860s, where he called his wicked baronet-villain ‘Sir Ruthven’ (see Chapter 34).

2. At this stage in Dr No, shortly after Bond has landed on the Caribbean island which is the monster’s lair, the sense that we are about to confront the monster is heightened when Bond sees, coming across a lake at night:

‘a shapeless thing, with two glaring eyes ... between them, where the mouth might be, fluttered a yard of blue flame. The grey luminescence of the stars showed some kind of a domed head, with two short, bat-like wings.’

This turns out to be merely a mechanical ‘monster’, built by Dr No to frighten off the local fishermen, but it prepares us for the first meeting with the real thing a few pages later.

3. This summary of the Star Wars plot is based on Lucas’s ghostwritten novel of the story. Two years after Star Wars, another Hollywood science fiction film Alien (1979) reflected the rise of late-twentieth-century feminism by providing a rare example of an Overcoming the Monster story in which the central role of ‘monster-slayer’ is played by a woman. The heroine, Ripley, is second-in-command of a space ship, far out in space, which is invaded by a peculiarly clever and ruthless alien. One by one it gruesomely destroys each of her six fellow-crew members, leaving her alone. She realises her only hope of escape is to bail out in a small spacecraft, and to blow up the main ship with the monster in it. No sooner is the mother-ship destroyed, however, than she realises the alien has escaped with her. There is a final battle in which the heroine blasts the monster out into space, and the film ends with her sleeping peacefully on her way back to earth.