Review: Broken Monsters

Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



A horror/thriller set in Detroit, a bizarre murder, and the underground art/music scene features prominently? Sure, sign me up! Beukes starts Broken Monsters off with a bang: a cop finds the body of a young boy lying in the street. Not only has the poor kid been murdered, but he's been mutilated; his lower body removed and replaced with the legs of a fawn. Creepy! From there, the novel follows the multiple perspectives and the cast of characters spiral closer to each as they try to discover the truth (about the murder, about each other, about themselves).

Gabi, the lead detective, struggles with balancing her responsibilities as a parent with her responsibilities to the department. Her daughter, Layla, struggles with her feelings for a boy who doesn't care and with feeling like an outcast. TK, an elderly homeless man who helps out at the shelters, struggles with his place in the world and with making peace with himself for his past. Jonno, a former journalist, struggles with a midlife crisis, and his loneliness after the collapse of a relationship. Clay struggles with the possibility that he's losing his mind and the loss of control of his life as he feels like his dreams are taking over.

One of the strongest elements of Broken Monsters is the way that Beukes manages to create such believable characters. All of them are struggling and evolving, and all of them have their own distinct personalities. As the story unfolds and the events in the book start to take a toll on them, we see different sides of their personalities evolve and come out. As in real life, this can happen after a traumatic experience (Lay's discovery that Cas was sexually assaulted, and that the video is still being passed around the Internet), or can be a more gradual process (the way Jonno starts off a desperate sad-sack, following Jen around like a puppy, doing anything he can to impress her, but he ends up slowly losing interest in her as he finds himself drawn into the story of the Detroit Monster and eventually starts ordering her around, demanding more and more of her to keep going).

The... shift that happens in the story was unexpected but not unwelcome (although, depending on your interests, it could be). I was glad that I hadn't read spoilers about it beforehand, as it created a sort of slow burn "is it? isn't it?" as the novel progressed.

Overall, a strong, at times disturbing thriller, although, as I said to my friends, I'm officially calling a moratorium on middle aged people not knowing how to use computers or search the internet. Gabi is supposed to be something around 40ish, I think? She's got a teenage daughter, and she's feeling middle aged, but she's clearly not ancient. The book appears to be set in modern times. She's the lead detective, and clearly knows how to use the technology she needs to for work. Yet, the minute she gets home, she needs her daughter to show her how to do a Google search? Ugh. no. Annoying.

That aside, I'd definitely recommend this to my friends.



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