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A review by crowsandprose
Mr Monster by Dan Wells
3.0
While I greatly enjoyed I Am Not A Serial Killer, Wells' John Cleaver followup simply didn't reach the heights of the original. It took far too long to reach the meat of the plot, John's mental processes were muddled and less engaging, and the addition of the Mr. Monster made this feel far too Dexter derivative (and I hated Lidnsey's Dexter, but I loved the streamlined Showtime Dexter that scraped a lot of the crapoff the source material for the honest gems inside the base premise.)
That's the short bit: the longer bits come now.
We spend over 150 pages just meandering through John's life. He's got an FBI agent on his back, he'strying to figure out what to do with the object of his fixation, and thinking back to his big score a few months ago. Small town Clayton life is not all that interesting, and it makes for slow reading.
John doesn't understand human behavior, but has learned how to vaguely immitate it. I say vaguely, because where most sociopaths are skilled manipulators, John falls flat here. He lacks charisma, makes morbid jokes, and is generally known to be abnormal since he's working at the morgue with his mom. This also hurts our ability to engage with him, because his emotional state is flat and foreign. I know that's the crux of the book -- that's part of what makes him useful to his eventual captor. But it's inconsistent, and states his "John can't feel [blank]" as opposed to having more concrete sensory details. When his blood's up, why aren't we getting more of the rush? When he just can't bring himself to care about the torture victims, we should get some sort of cue that isn't just John telling us in the least emotionally engaging language.
This proves inconsistent through the work, though. Suddenly John longs for heroism and a break from his sociopathic nature. Is he honestly a sociopath then? If he realizes there is a right and a wrong, if he wants to do the RIGHT thing as opposed to the surival thing, the needs thing, is he honestly that disconnected? It betrays the whole conciet of the series, and leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth.
So which is it? Generic Teen Male hero with madness as a superpower (my least favorite trope in fiction) or a genuine teen predator who has simply found his fixation, and that other victims simply won't interest/cut it for him? That answer was never delivered. I don't know that it will be in the next book, either. (Which I own and will still read!)
Anyway -- it wasn't a bad book, but it left way too much in question, was far too slow, and wasn't internally consistent. On the other hand, it separated John and Brooke, gave us more demon understanding, and the action, once it got started, was top notch. So it's not all flaws, there were good bits to it. It's just wasn't what I was hoping for out of Wells and Cleaver.
That's the short bit: the longer bits come now.
We spend over 150 pages just meandering through John's life. He's got an FBI agent on his back, he'strying to figure out what to do with the object of his fixation, and thinking back to his big score a few months ago. Small town Clayton life is not all that interesting, and it makes for slow reading.
John doesn't understand human behavior, but has learned how to vaguely immitate it. I say vaguely, because where most sociopaths are skilled manipulators, John falls flat here. He lacks charisma, makes morbid jokes, and is generally known to be abnormal since he's working at the morgue with his mom. This also hurts our ability to engage with him, because his emotional state is flat and foreign. I know that's the crux of the book -- that's part of what makes him useful to his eventual captor. But it's inconsistent, and states his "John can't feel [blank]" as opposed to having more concrete sensory details. When his blood's up, why aren't we getting more of the rush? When he just can't bring himself to care about the torture victims, we should get some sort of cue that isn't just John telling us in the least emotionally engaging language.
This proves inconsistent through the work, though. Suddenly John longs for heroism and a break from his sociopathic nature. Is he honestly a sociopath then? If he realizes there is a right and a wrong, if he wants to do the RIGHT thing as opposed to the surival thing, the needs thing, is he honestly that disconnected? It betrays the whole conciet of the series, and leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth.
So which is it? Generic Teen Male hero with madness as a superpower (my least favorite trope in fiction) or a genuine teen predator who has simply found his fixation, and that other victims simply won't interest/cut it for him? That answer was never delivered. I don't know that it will be in the next book, either. (Which I own and will still read!)
Anyway -- it wasn't a bad book, but it left way too much in question, was far too slow, and wasn't internally consistent. On the other hand, it separated John and Brooke, gave us more demon understanding, and the action, once it got started, was top notch. So it's not all flaws, there were good bits to it. It's just wasn't what I was hoping for out of Wells and Cleaver.