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The 10 Greatest Female Monsters In Literature, From Carmilla To The Woman In Black

'Tis the season for celebrating decorative gourds, sugar, changing seasons, and, of course, monsters. Wear all the punny Halloween costumes you like, but at the end of the day, Halloween is all about turning the ordinary into the monstrous. And many of our great, genre-defining monsters come from books: there's Dracula and Mr. Hyde, Cthulhu and Pennywise and the Invisible Man. There's Dr. Frankenstein's large adult son. Those guys are all great and scary and all... but literary monster-dom can feel like a bit of a boy's club. Where are all the fiendish ladies? Why can't that horrific, shambling mess of corpses be a girl? If you're looking for some extremely nasty women this October, then look no further: here are a few of the greatest female monsters that literature has to offer.

Some of the monsters we celebrate in October are genuinely terrifying (like Christopher Columbus), while others are simply misunderstood. Here you'll find hideously wicked witches and witches who choose wickedness as an act of political resistance. There are grotesque sea monsters and fierce lake monsters who just want to protect their kids. There are vampires who like girls and vampires who are actually genetically modified aliens (kind of) and at least one gorgon, so take your pick of lady monsters to look up to this spooky season:

Twenty-six years before Dracula arrived to give vampires their classic look (and their xenophobic accent), there was Carmilla from Carmilla, the suave and seductive lesbian vampire who wants to turn all your daughters into children of the night. She has unearthly beauty and the ability to turn into a giant cat. She sleeps in a coffin. She clearly represents all of 19th century England's anxieties about women (like that they'll go out at night and kiss each other). The only bad thing about Carmilla is that she gets staked in the end, instead of leading an army of gay vampires to take down Victorian high society.

The Odyssey is full to the brim with lady monsters and goddesses and witches and whatnot. There's the enchantress Circe and the singing sirens and the clingy Calypso. But most dangerous of all was the six-headed rock monster, Scylla, and her sea monster counterpart, Charybdis. In reality these "monsters" were probably just a shoal of sharp rocks and a whirlpool, making it extremely dangerous for ships to pass between them. But in The Odyssey they are both beautiful women who have been transformed into hideous monsters as a punishment, and they spend their days eating sailors and wrecking entire ships. Excellent teamwork, ladies.

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The last book of Octavia Butler's formidable career, Fledgling completely upends the traditional vampire myth. Here we have Shori, a genetically modified 53-year-old vampire trapped in the body of a child. But Shori isn't interested in wearing black leather and hanging out in European castles. Instead, she just wants to find out what makes her a vampire, and to have a consensual, chill, symbiotic blood-sucking relationship with her human of choice.

There are three monsters in the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf: there's Grendel, who's some sort of a troll or a giant. There's a dragon, who shows up at the end to give the hero a big dramatic finish. And then in the middle there's... Grendel's mom. Beowulf slays Grendel, and then he has to fight his mom. In her underwater cave. And she is a stone cold bad ass. Scholars differ on whether she's a troll or a lake monster or a demon or what, but I can tell you for sure that she is one heck of an excellent monster mother, and probably the real hero of Beowulf. Don't mess with her beautiful troll son.

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A lot of the lady monster out there are old (because old women are scary!) or sexy (because women who like sex are also scary!) or else they're mothers who don't act like mothers "should" act (the horror!). But Melanie from The Girl with All the Gifts is just a regular little girl who just so happens to also be a (spoiler alert) blood-thirsty zombie. But just because she craves human flesh, that doesn't mean she can't also like math and learning and hanging out with her teacher. Kind of like Matilda, only instead of telekinesis she just eats people.