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A review by flowerwineandbooks
Man Made Monsters by Andrea L. Rogers
4.0
This is an odd book, and a hard one to rate and review, but I think it's ingenuity deserves that much. The more I sit on these stories the richer I find them and I enjoy the stories much more then I did while reading them at face value. At first glance, the characters felt underdeveloped/disconnected on the surface, but after having read the entirety and looking back with the big picture, I can see that they're beautifully wound together in an inter-generational story as well as a fully integrated character arc spanning across centuries.
This is definitely some lovely, weird, creepy horror!! This Indigenous horror is just so incredibly terrifying and densely layered. Readers will definitely get more out of these stories with some background knowledge on Cherokee history in the US.
Also - THE ILLUSTRATIONS! Wow. The black pages with the white graphics worked SO WELL and the images themselves seamlessly combined with the Cherokee syllabary is absolutely stunning. It adds an atmospheric tone to the genre, themes, setting, characters, everything.
There are tons of trigger warnings for grief, suicide, sexual assault, death of children, murder, MMIW, school shootings, domestic abuse, and I'm likely forgetting some.
Scariest Stories:
An Old-Fashioned Girl
Man Made Monsters
Lens
Deer Women
Most Impactful Stories:
Snow Day
Ghost Cat
Ama's Boys
The Zombies Attack the Drive-In!
Favorite Stories:
Hell Hound in No Man's Land
Me and My Monster
Deer Women
I Come From the Water
This is definitely some lovely, weird, creepy horror!! This Indigenous horror is just so incredibly terrifying and densely layered. Readers will definitely get more out of these stories with some background knowledge on Cherokee history in the US.
Also - THE ILLUSTRATIONS! Wow. The black pages with the white graphics worked SO WELL and the images themselves seamlessly combined with the Cherokee syllabary is absolutely stunning. It adds an atmospheric tone to the genre, themes, setting, characters, everything.
There are tons of trigger warnings for grief, suicide, sexual assault, death of children, murder, MMIW, school shootings, domestic abuse, and I'm likely forgetting some.
Scariest Stories:
An Old-Fashioned Girl
Man Made Monsters
Lens
Deer Women
Most Impactful Stories:
Snow Day
Ghost Cat
Ama's Boys
The Zombies Attack the Drive-In!
Favorite Stories:
Hell Hound in No Man's Land
Me and My Monster
Deer Women
I Come From the Water