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A review by dark_reader
Monster by Matt Shaw, Michael Bray
3.0
At some point in my mid-twenties I was feeling out of sorts, a little lost, depressed, and I had a desire to find some horror novel that was truly disturbing, I supposed to shock me out of my funk or just to give me an intensity of feeling. I didn't find it. I didn't look super-hard, to be fair, and I did find [a:Brian Lumley|20602|Brian Lumley|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1246727488p2/20602.jpg]'s books as a result, which did not fit that particular bill but at least entertained me.
I read Monster now to give Matt Shaw a try after seeing a lot of his books reviewed by my GR friend Mort. I was nervous at the outset; could I handle black-cover extreme horror? The answer is, apparently, "yes." I found the whole thing rather silly, to be honest. It reminded me of scenes from Saw and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Putting candles in the birthday cake? Funny. The most horrifying part was the torturous domestic abuse, not so much disturbing in-text but but because it made me think of certain real-life accounts of awful child abuse and neglect. Now those are terrifying and disturbing. I'm a bigger fan of supernatural or cosmic or demonic horror in general.
The book was okay. The (victim) character backgrounds were decent, well-rounded. The story's location was confusing, because the first guy appears to be in England, as evidenced by calling diapers 'nappies' and the social expectation of buying equal rounds of pints in the pub, but the story is otherwise specified as set in Indiana, and there is no Indiana in England that I could find. I suspect that the authors were not mindful of these Britishisms, and I don't know that there was a third-party editor involved who could have caught that. The book could have used some more internal layout work, in terms of visually setting the layers of parts, chapters and sub-chapter headings, although maybe this type of story is best left a little disorganized.
Surprise, the real monster may not be who you expect!
I read Monster now to give Matt Shaw a try after seeing a lot of his books reviewed by my GR friend Mort. I was nervous at the outset; could I handle black-cover extreme horror? The answer is, apparently, "yes." I found the whole thing rather silly, to be honest. It reminded me of scenes from Saw and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Putting candles in the birthday cake? Funny. The most horrifying part was the torturous domestic abuse, not so much disturbing in-text but but because it made me think of certain real-life accounts of awful child abuse and neglect. Now those are terrifying and disturbing. I'm a bigger fan of supernatural or cosmic or demonic horror in general.
The book was okay. The (victim) character backgrounds were decent, well-rounded. The story's location was confusing, because the first guy appears to be in England, as evidenced by calling diapers 'nappies' and the social expectation of buying equal rounds of pints in the pub, but the story is otherwise specified as set in Indiana, and there is no Indiana in England that I could find. I suspect that the authors were not mindful of these Britishisms, and I don't know that there was a third-party editor involved who could have caught that. The book could have used some more internal layout work, in terms of visually setting the layers of parts, chapters and sub-chapter headings, although maybe this type of story is best left a little disorganized.
Surprise, the real monster may not be who you expect!