Lauren Beukes ’ newfangled novelBroken Monstersis about the saturnine forces that wake in abandoned post — and abandoned people — when they yearn for the kind of attention they once had . Set in the back alleys and art warehouses of Detroit , it ’s a supernatural thriller that will vex you in all the proper way .
Like Beukes ’ last novel , The Shining Girls , Broken Monsters is as much about an American city as it is about the mass passing through it . In The Shining Girls , our semi - supernatural killer seems present a direful part of Chicago ’s account ; and in Broken Monsters , we have a cause of death who captures a twisted aspect of Detroit ’s present tense . Economic troubles have drive aside the metropolis ’s once - booming population , leaving behind empty industrial buildings and unlighted street . It ’s a metropolis that nobody seems to care about any longer .
In this ghost urban center , however , there are still hundreds of thousands of people who are just try out to get along and survive , despite their urban center ’s bother . Beukes plunge us correctly into the middle of the urban center ’s diverse universe , charting how the liveliness of several the great unwashed are brought together unexpectedly around a serial of horrific murders .
Detective Versado is one of the first people visit to the scene when a untested male child ’s body is discovered in a burrow , next to a crude ice drawing of a door . Well , at least part of the son ’s body is discovered — his head and torso have been glue to the lower body of a baby deer . As Versado tries to track the slayer while prevent details of the crime obscured , Beukes introduces us to our other major characters , all of whom are dealing with their own toxic relationships with abstruseness ( and its lack ) .
Versado ’s daughter Layla has a good friend with a mysterious past times of internet opprobrium . Layla herself is toying with anonymous spook online , testing to see how far they will go . Meanwhile , a disgraced diary keeper named Jonno has just blown into town , and is trying to reinvent himself as a vlogger by using his disc jockey girlfriend to take him into Detroit ’s clandestine art scene . He ’s hoping his YouTube dispatches from the dead metropolis will make him relevant in New York again . And then there ’s a down - on - his luck artist named Clayton whose work nobody has cared about for a very retentive time . He ’s so consumed with a desire for fame and erotic love that he ’s pass on his mind open to hostile takeover by — something .
All of them are searching for a way to reveal themselves to a wide-eyed hearing , and none of them understand the consequences . Squirming through these characters ’ story like a hidden sewage burrow is the fate of Detroit itself , a city that was once the nation ’s jewel , now flip apart .
When Jonno gets some pirate footage of one of Versado ’s offense fit , he ’s able to bring Detroit back to the country ’s attention — but only as a horror show . As the novel ’s mood grows more surreal and antic , we watch as the flash fame of societal media turns everyone into distorted , horror show adaptation of themselves .
Beukes masterfully pulls us through the torturesome story , partly because she ’s glorious with secret plan and character — and partially because she knows how to draw corollaries where you might never expect them . We see how nonfigurative art , murder , and viral abasement television are variant of the same momentum . Each is an expression of selfhood that has been utterly mutilated by the process of making individual parts of ourselves visible to the volume .
But is it the urge to be seen , to be celebrated , that destroys us ? Or is it the mode other people slip and reframe our identities in their own quest for exposure ? In short , who is to find fault for the endless bicycle of destructive revelation that characterizes many people ’s life in the internet age ?
Broken Monsters will leave you enquire , and satiate your mind with burning visual sensation of what happens to those who presume to answer these questions . This is a novel that will take you to some dark place — philosophically and narratively — but it also has the backbone to intimate that hope is not lost . We can bump our room out of the thicket of lies and cruelty , even if we make a pot of worthless mistake along the way .
book reviewBooksLauren Beukes
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