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A review by octavia_cade
The Monsters We Deserve by Marcus Sedgwick
dark
reflective
tense
medium-paced
4.0
I really enjoyed this. I'll have to get a copy of my own, I think, as this one goes back to the library tomorrow. There's this really effective sense of seeping horror, of ghostly dislocation, as the protagonist isolates himself in a small house in the Swiss Alps, trying to create a book that's deliberately inspired by Frankenstein - a novel which he considers to be "abysmal" - only to be interrupted by apparitions of Mary Shelley and her characters. I like the exploration of monstrosity, particularly through the lens of what it means to create a monster as a horror writer.
I do think it fell down towards the end, unfortunately. The presentation of Frankenstein as misunderstood is accurate to some extent, but the interpretation of it as a book about responsibility to what you have created is neither new nor original... which wouldn't be a problem, except The Monsters We Deserve seems to present the responsibility interpretation as a moment of climax. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together who is even passingly familiar with the source novel will have come to this conclusion before their first read of Frankenstein is over. Furthermore, the eventual conflation, at the end of the book, of the author and the monster was, honestly, a little bit expected.
So, yeah. Really great up until the last quarter or so, at which point it stumbles into the obvious and never quite recovers. I still want a copy for that first three-quarters, though.
I do think it fell down towards the end, unfortunately. The presentation of Frankenstein as misunderstood is accurate to some extent, but the interpretation of it as a book about responsibility to what you have created is neither new nor original... which wouldn't be a problem, except The Monsters We Deserve seems to present the responsibility interpretation as a moment of climax. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together who is even passingly familiar with the source novel will have come to this conclusion before their first read of Frankenstein is over. Furthermore, the eventual conflation, at the end of the book, of the author and the monster was, honestly, a little bit expected.
So, yeah. Really great up until the last quarter or so, at which point it stumbles into the obvious and never quite recovers. I still want a copy for that first three-quarters, though.