In the British Museum's Mesopotamian galleries, behind glass, sits a clay mask approximately three thousand eight hundred years old. The face was made to terrify. Hooded sockets sink the eyes into darkness, intestinal coils wrap the brow, and a chipped tooth grins from the left side of the mouth. The mask was paid for. Somebody walked silver from a temple administrator's hand to a workshop, where an artisan converted clay and several days of labor into a working monster, and the figure left the workshop on a delivery cart for a fee. The specific contract has not survived. The architecture in which the contract was negotiated has survived, in thousands of cuneiform tablets across the major Mesopotamian archives. Commissioned Monsters opens with that mask and proceeds across four thousand years of the same architecture.

The book argues that every monster you have ever encountered was made by somebody, paid for by somebody, and continues to generate profit for somebody. There is no collective unconscious doing this work. There is labor, there is an invoice, and there is a beneficiary. Most cultural commentary of the last century has treated monstrous figures as expressions of some deep cultural psyche, which has the effect of letting the contractors who designed and sold those figures disappear into a fog of mystical attribution. Commissioned Monsters refuses the fog and works through twenty case studies, naming the contractors where the documentary record permits naming them: the temple administrators of Old Babylonia, the Salem prosecutors, the Penny Press editors, the Reagan campaign operatives, the daycare-prosecution attorneys, the cable-news producers, and the contemporary digital-political operatives still at work.

The architecture has not changed. The labor has not changed. Only the throughput has changed.