Ok, so you need to decide whether you are going to use C styles strings which are character arrays or C++ strings. My suggestion would be to stick with C++ strings for what you are doing. In that case you need to do:
Code:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <iostream>
#include <string>

...
int main() {

    string monsdescription;
...
    if (monstype == 1){
	monsdescription = "Big hairy ugly thing";
    }
And then your provided cout statement is fine.