‘One look and you recognize evil’: Lycan Terrorism, Monstrous Otherness, and the Banality of Evil in Benjamin Percy's Red Moon

Abstract

Benjamin Percy's novel Red Moon (2013) navigates the problem of the ‘monster’ in the context of post-9/11 representations of Islamist terrorism. Structured around a series of terrorist atrocities carried out by lycan extremists, Percy's novel employs the werewolf as a figure of monstrous otherness in order to deconstruct the very processes of othering by which the monster is produced culturally and politically. Focusing on the distorted ethical justifications of the terrorists and on the roles of political opportunism and media manipulation in shaping US responses, the narrative allows both lycan terrorists and their political antagonists to emerge as more clown than monster. This article draws upon Hannah Arendt's account of the banality of evil, and its development by more recent privation theorists, to situate Red Moon within contemporary popular and theoretical discourses of evil and to read the novel as an interrogation of the processes by which our modern political ‘monsters’ are created.