The warrior Beowulf shows up and, after engaging in some mead-fueled boasting, engages in battle with Grendel, ultimately killing him by ripping his arm off at the socket. But his peace is troubled by the embittered monster Grendel, who comes nightly to pick off Hrothgar’s thanes and drag them back to his lair to eat their bones. Hrothgar, an ancient warlord-king, builds a mighty palace and mead-hall called Heorot to stand as a tribute to his greatness.

The simple plot of the novel closely tracks that of Beowulf, its source material. No matter how many times I come back to it, Grendel still retains its ability to surprise. That feeling has sustained itself through multiple readings over the years.

It was only years later when a trusted friend insisted over and over again that I read Grendel, practically thrusting the novel into my hands, that I gave in and discovered in its pages a work that felt newer, fresher, and far more dangerous than what I’d expected. Even the cover seemed to conspire in making me think the book was dull: that drab illustration in shades of brown and tan evoking the yellowed pages of a historical archive, and a fluffy monster looking a little like a Muppet, his head thrown back to unleash a howl at the sky. Ī reworking of the Beowulf myth from the monster’s perspective? Snore. A few of my professors had recommended the novel to me when I was an undergraduate, but I resisted, thinking the book too musty, too stodgy, too… well, classic, precisely the category the book now apparently qualifies for. I’d been the one to think of the novel in connection with the prompt, but I was still surprised to find that Grendel had reached the threshold to qualify as someone’s definition of an “old” book-almost as much as the book itself surprised me when I first read it years ago.

Scurrying to Google to look up the year of publication, I found that the novel was published in 1971-50 years ago. Not long ago, an acquaintance on Twitter asked for recommendations of lesser-read classics, which he defined as “anything published fifty years ago or more.” Unable to resist any occasion for a book recommendation, I began ticking through titles in my head and came, eventually, to John Gardner’s Grendel, a perennial favorite of mine.

Grendel gardner