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A review by inuyasha
Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova
2.0
2024 the year of me being a contrarian to every popular, well received book i pick up i guess. every less than 4 star review of this is just someone extremely pedestrian going on and on about how WHACKY !! and weird this book turned out to be and that is so boring when there are - to me - actual real flaws.
really enjoyed this in the first quarter and was excited about where it was going but it pretty quickly lost me. i found all the POVs past magos' portion really dull - the character voices were just not there to me. the writing felt lifeless, the emotional intelligence was pretty much the same across the board, and i felt like i was being held at arm's length away from whatever was actually happening in text. joseph's POV in particular was especially grating. there's a pretty strong sense of villainization towards magos' that didn't sit well with me, either.
sometimes, you pick up books that have too much overlap with your own personal life and you can acknowledge when it makes you a biased reader, and that may be the case here. i really do not feel like the author had experienced the loss of a child in your immediate family, or at the very least does not possess the tools and talent to convey anything meaningful about it beyond what has made reviewers throw out buzzwords like ohhhhh the grief! the traumaaa! especially in a horror setting, there are a lot of things to play with there that i never felt touched upon. particularly, i was excited for monstrilio's POV because i personally know the innate horror in child loss is how you, the replacement child/The One Who Didn't Die, will always be compared to a ghost who was never a fully realized person - every mistake and life choice you make will be measured and countered against something made mythic in your parent's minds who would make the "better" decision than you have. and we get a little bit of that, but it once again has no bite.
i've been reading interviews with the author in an attempt to maybe understand decisions made here from a technical perspective better, and maybe bolster some appreciation for it because not "getting" this has been a top disappointment of this year. however, it's repeated in every interview he does that the ultimate goal of this book was to push the concept of "how far can you as a child go before what is supposed to be unconditional (the love of a parent/family) is taken away" - a very real fear that works well as both queer allegory and horror that any trans/gay/whatever reader will surely recognize as their own fears given fangs and flesh. however, the author making both of monstrilio's parents queer in their own right like fully tanks any metaphor work happening here - which could have been cool if the direction had focused on magos and joseph's own flaws and unsavory behaviors as well, but that's not really what's happening here. and don't even get me started on how badly this author cannot properly frame disability as a narrative device. doesn't play with the gothic tropes it insists upon in any interesting or meaningful way - and the weird look!! a copy of WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE!! as an attempt to really emphasize that this is a gothic novel to the reader in the final chapter made me snort out loud.
idk just overall a huge swing and miss for me.
really enjoyed this in the first quarter and was excited about where it was going but it pretty quickly lost me. i found all the POVs past magos' portion really dull - the character voices were just not there to me. the writing felt lifeless, the emotional intelligence was pretty much the same across the board, and i felt like i was being held at arm's length away from whatever was actually happening in text. joseph's POV in particular was especially grating. there's a pretty strong sense of villainization towards magos' that didn't sit well with me, either.
sometimes, you pick up books that have too much overlap with your own personal life and you can acknowledge when it makes you a biased reader, and that may be the case here. i really do not feel like the author had experienced the loss of a child in your immediate family, or at the very least does not possess the tools and talent to convey anything meaningful about it beyond what has made reviewers throw out buzzwords like ohhhhh the grief! the traumaaa! especially in a horror setting, there are a lot of things to play with there that i never felt touched upon. particularly, i was excited for monstrilio's POV because i personally know the innate horror in child loss is how you, the replacement child/The One Who Didn't Die, will always be compared to a ghost who was never a fully realized person - every mistake and life choice you make will be measured and countered against something made mythic in your parent's minds who would make the "better" decision than you have. and we get a little bit of that, but it once again has no bite.
i've been reading interviews with the author in an attempt to maybe understand decisions made here from a technical perspective better, and maybe bolster some appreciation for it because not "getting" this has been a top disappointment of this year. however, it's repeated in every interview he does that the ultimate goal of this book was to push the concept of "how far can you as a child go before what is supposed to be unconditional (the love of a parent/family) is taken away" - a very real fear that works well as both queer allegory and horror that any trans/gay/whatever reader will surely recognize as their own fears given fangs and flesh. however, the author making both of monstrilio's parents queer in their own right like fully tanks any metaphor work happening here - which could have been cool if the direction had focused on magos and joseph's own flaws and unsavory behaviors as well, but that's not really what's happening here. and don't even get me started on how badly this author cannot properly frame disability as a narrative device. doesn't play with the gothic tropes it insists upon in any interesting or meaningful way - and the weird look!! a copy of WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE!! as an attempt to really emphasize that this is a gothic novel to the reader in the final chapter made me snort out loud.
idk just overall a huge swing and miss for me.