One: I begin with an account of Stephen Gregory’s prizewinning horror novel The Cormorant, which synthesises much of the history of representing the cormorant as evil. I then trace this tradition across time, looking closely at the origins of the Satanic cormorant in medieval and early modern European theology, art and literature, notably in paintings by Bellini, Mantegna and Carpaccio, and I address Milton’s choice in Paradise Lost to bring Satan into Eden in the form of a cormorant. I describe the long-term impact of Milton’s Satanic cormorant in literary prose from Jane Eyre to Dracula and in scientific writing from Willughby to Bewick, and finally I provide a reading of a poem by Denise Levertov in which the cormorant is characterised as an avian Nazi. In the process, I reflect on the nature of metaphor and the apparent inevitability of anthropocentrism in writing about nonhuman animals.