The aim of this paper is to defend a richer theoretical understanding of what we call monsters, and to argue for the development of document teratology, which we see as an important scientific issue for documentology. We start from the premise that the default state of communication is incommunication, and that documentation, developed to counter this, seems to have become overwhelmed from the inside by its own problematic development. We then discuss the opportunity of a document teratology, based on nuanced description of what the word monster means. We describe two strong imperatives, monstration and categorisation, and the tension between them. We show that monsters are a product of modernity, and not pure aberrations. We suggest some metaphorical monsters from literary or scientific works to be used as tools of theoretical and practical work in the context of documentology. Finally, we reassess the rhizome as a model and suggest replacing with the stolon, more appropriate in some cases