Review by linguisticali - Of Monsters and Mainframes

linguisticali 's review for:

Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove

5.0

adventurous dark emotional funny lighthearted fast-paced

I received an advance copy of the e-book from Bindery Books and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I picked this up because of the stunning cover (this crop of Bindery books is so pretty!) and the wacky description - Demeter? Dracula? The queer love-child of pulp horror and classic sci-fi?? - and I had no idea what to expect. It ended up being an absolute delight.

Of Monsters and Mainframes is weird, unexpected and charming. Queerness and monstrousness have a long history in horror and this fees like it plays with that trope with such genuine love and affection - for the genre, for queerness, and for the monstrous.

This grabbed me right from the beginning and immediately felt like a 5-star read. After that, the early chapters cycled through various different trips and monsters and my attention started to wander (the Lovecraftian chapter in particular felt a little out of place), but it all came together beautifully in the end.

For all the humour and wackiness, this has so much heart. I love the characters (AI and humanoid) and the way their relationships develop over the course of the story. I was in tears at several points towards the end. I love found family as much as the next queer, but it can sometimes feel forced or cheesy - here, it felt absolutely earned.

There is one scene I want to mention where a fleeting side character is declared insane, restrained, and subjected to invasive medical tests. It's all treated as funny and whimsical because they're actually an alien monstrosity and declaring them insane is the excuse the medical AI needs to detain them. Given the reality of how mentally ill people are often treated, it felt awful to read in a way the rest of the horror movie violence and creepiness didn't.

Content Warnings