A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

When the cover of this book was first released, I had a nightmare about it. I dreamed about an autumn corn field, barren and dry, and that I was running away from something trying to get to a house that kept receding the faster I ran. Anyone who has spent any time out in the country knows what this phenomenon feels like. Maybe it’s a physics thing – the curve of the earth creating some optical illusion, I don’t know, but there’s something about trying to cross a corn field that feels like eternity stretching before you. You walk and walk and walk and never seem to get closer to home.

That was what the dream was like. But nevermind. That’s only interesting in the context that the first time I saw the cover, it gave me nightmares.

A Monster Calls and Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan are two books with a strong argument for including art in novels. Using engravings to illustrate books used to be the norm, but at some point along the way adult readers and adult publishers made some conscious decision that illustrating books was for kids, drawing the dividing line between serious and not-worth-your-time novels. Many books are changing this perception, and I look forward to seeing more of it.

A Monster Calls might be a young adult book, but its illustrations are profoundly beautiful and terrifying at the same time. Like a vintage, gorgeous wool coat full of spiders.

The artist’s name is Jim Kay and I love how creepy and active his drawings are. I can feel the monster lumbering across the landscape, the hoom, hoom, drum of his steps. I can’t help it. I hear Yeats in my ear, whispering, “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Every page has something more than words, and I love how carefully this book was typeset. The messy India Ink drawings splash and smear and spread up and around the blocks of text, forcing the paragraphs out of their standard blockiness to fit into uneven, unnatural shapes. The white space feels contained and surrounded, and this proves an interesting effect on reading. It becomes far easier to lose your eyes inside the text, herded and corralled by the black drawings which drive out the real world like shadow. The diving into the narrative and getting trapped there is almost too easy. It provides a visual illusion of being drawn in too close to the text and characters, too close to the events, and my rational mind is tricked into feeling, for brief moments, like I am in immediate danger instead of the text boy, Conor.

While it looks like a horror, A Monster Calls isn’t traditional in any sense of the word. It’s scary, yes, but in a primal way – the same emotion that pressures you off a dark, empty street even when you don’t recognize an immediate threat. The story is sad and traumatic and haunted, but not in the way I was expecting. Like the art, the voice of the story does its own little illusion to really creep you out.

The story is written from a thirteen year old boy’s perspective and reads like a children’s book. There are simple perspectives, thirteen year old boy thoughts, but the events unfolding, the psychological hauntings, are the sort of things children are usually hidden from, their eyes covered, their curtains pulled. The juxtaposition is unsettling and visceral. Every time I put the book down I have to work to control my panic.

A gorgeous book masterfully written, language spun out of spider webs and falling leaves, characters who are neither easy to love or satisfying to hate, all culminating on a twist of storytelling that will leave you with indescribable emotions and a need to be alone for a while.

It’s only real failing is that it looks like a horror novel, a really great, traditional, experienced horror novel, and it’s not. Not in the least. The cover is very grown up, the silver metallic finish and simple, classic font choice feel too adult for the writing style found inside, and this is probably going to turn some readers away before they realize how rich the story actually is. This is a book where nothing is trustworthy – that even the cover is playing tricks on you.

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Saturday and Sunday’s Monstrologists Hunted…

Angeline Trevena: Bakeneko – the Japanese Monster Cat
Megan Grimit: Vampire
Kurt Hartwig: Ouroboros

Today’s Monstrologists are Hunting…

Jason Beineke: Ghoul