Natalie Lawrence's Enchanted Creatures is a fairly entertaining read, an attempt to dig into why humans imagine monsters, and what various kinds of monsters mean to us and what they say about us. It's unfortunately one of those books where the research is marred by bizarre mistakes; the most basic check on Google would yield the info that the Goblin King in Labyrinth is called Jareth, not Jared, for instance. 

When that kind of easily-verifiable fact is wrong, it really casts everything else into doubt. There is a bibliography with some references, which is somewhat reassuring, but... Jared? I know that's wrong and I've never even seen Labyrinth.

Or there's a section where she refers to Circe as one of several snake women who've had modern novels written from their point of view. What? Circe isn't associated with snakes.

The more I think about it, the more it falls to bits -- how can any conclusions be supported when this stuff is randomly mentioned without actual evidence? If you want me to accept that Circe's a snake-woman in some way, then we need the evidence.