Monster Love

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And as I felt appaled of this having happened, the story extracts all emotion out of it and leaves only a dry and decaying lump of a novel. Many of the characters use language that's completely inconsistent with their context/background, and they don't sound different enough from one another for the multiple-narrators thing to really work.

However by the time the full horror of events is revealed, I actually felt quite nauseous and wanted to take a shower. The knowledge of Sontag’s bad qualities, if I’m completely honest, adds a slight frisson of further enjoyment to my readings. So far it's not particularly graphic, which I appreciate, and I've been quite drawn in by some of the narratives. Once we’re free, she can have anything she wants from me so long as she doesn’t want me to let her go. The voices often sounded the same and used the same vocabulary, and nearly everything seemed overwritten.She suspects “that balance is different for everyone,” thus rendering each individual attempt to achieve it as “a lonely puzzle of pleasure and responsibility. I thought it was interesting and clever that the book focuses on the couple rather than what was inflicted on the child, it really conveyed both their weird obsession with each other and complete lack of empathy for anyone else. My son really likes the Love Monster TV show, so he enjoyed seeing one of his favourite characters in book form too!

Answering this question honestly can feel like doing violence to others and often requires identifying the monster in myself. Told through the Gutteridges' voices, and those of their families, neighbours, and those who will come across them in the aftermath, this perverse love story hurtles to the heart of evil - the evil that could be anyone's next door neighbour. Most people know that Mary Shelley wrote the novel Frankenstein, but the common perception that she dreamed up this story as part of a parlour game with poets Shelley and Byron is misleading. Ian Mark is an author and monster hunter who spends his time wrestling krakens, hypnotising bogeymen with an eyeball on a string of spaghetti, and writing about his adventures to entertain young monster hunters all around the world.Bought a second hand copy of this on impulse after reading a piece about literary villains which ended with a list of 'Five Notable Books Featuring a Villain’s Perspective'. Killing a child – especially your own – ranks high in the hierarchy of unconscionable acts, so I embarked on an archaeological dig in the Gutteridges' history, hoping to disinter whatever had caused them to kill their child. I read on average about 40 books per year, and I can't remember the last time I read one as bad as this.

We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Plot holes aside, I also felt that the book should have given a voice to Samantha (the couple's child). I wanted the author to explore this and explain how it was possible that people who had the capacity to love so deeply could commit the vile crime of killing their own child. The usual suspects—Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby—all make an appearance, as well as many others, sorted into categories such as “The Genius,” “Drunks,” and “The Silencers and the Silenced. I would recommend Monster Love to anyone for the writing in an instant, and yet the subject is one that makes me hesitate to recommend it at all – a paradoxical feeling that sums up the ambivalence of having discovered a book that tells a horrific story with absolute humanity and insight.

It was the only thing in the story that felt new or novel, that level of attempt at insight into how someone would rationalize doing such a reprehensible thing. During different stages of the book I could only read one chapter at a time because I found it so upsetting to read. Notwithstanding, why would they hand themselves in to the authorities and face being separated if their love and being together was all that mattered?

Her recollections toggle between affection and acid condemnation, a tension that mirrors the book’s ambivalence toward the work of artists she both admires and deplores. We did not need the "I'm a bad person because my dad raped me when I was a child" incredibly lame, useless, and easy plot device trotted out.Almost every character comes across as vacuous; they all discuss Brendan and Sherilyn at length, but the notion that Samantha's life was important is only given fleeting thought. With each chapter giving a different facet to the couple's dynamics/childhood, it felt like the author wanted us to empathize or sympathize with how the couple ended up at the conclusion they did.