Jay — I liked your reader’s e-mail, in part because this has been a hobbyhorse of mine for years. In 1999 I wrote an unpolished column on monsters in which I excerpted a speech by Geoffrey Canada, the 1992 recipient of the Robin Hood Award. It took me some time to find it, but here’s the excerpt (and here’s a PDF of Canada’s remarks):

You are probably going to be a little concerned when I tell you how happy I am to be honored as a children’s hero. Some people might say “don’t call me a hero”… But not me. I desperately want to be a children’s hero.
You see … children need heroes because a hero summons up images of supernatural powers. Heroes were meant to slay dragons and monsters, and far too many of our children face monsters every day.
Now I’m not speaking metaphorically. I’m talking about the real thing — Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy — real monsters. If you calculate the number of deaths these three monsters cause on any given night, it doesn’t compare to an average Friday night in New York City….
Our children face monsters who kill in the night and the day, monsters who lurk in the dark. They see monsters on their way to school, in the park, in the hallways at night — monsters who leave traces of their brutal work, staining floors and walls, the vestiges of which tell of horrors unspeakable to such young minds….
I do this work because I haven’t forgotten about the monsters. I remember them … I remember growing up in the South Bronx, when I was 7 and we were cooking potatoes in a hole in the ground….
Suddenly some man, who was crazy or drunk or evil or just a monster, burst on us screaming and grabbing and yelling. We all ran for our very lives, hit the fences and climbed over – all but one boy, William. He was fat; he was slow. He got caught….

The speech always stuck with me and over the years I’ve been writing about monsters (admittedly somewhat repetitively). There are real monsters out there. Understanding them won’t make them any less monsterish.