Broken Monsters is Lauren Beukes’s genre-bending novel of suspense. A criminal mastermind creates violent tableaus in abandoned Detroit warehouses.
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Scary as hell…hypnotic. I couldn’t put it down…I’d grab it if I were you.
In This LitStack Rec of Broken Monsters
From the Publisher:
Detective Gabriella Versado has seen a lot of bodies. But this one is unique even by Detroit’s standards: half boy, half deer, somehow fused together. As stranger and more disturbing bodies are discovered, how can the city hold on to a reality that is already tearing at its seams?
If you’re Detective Versado’s geeky teenage daughter, Layla, you commence a dangerous flirtation with a potential predator online. If you’re desperate freelance journalist Jonno, you do whatever it takes to get the exclusive on a horrific story. If you’re Thomas Keen, known on the street as TK, you’ll do what you can to keep your homeless family safe — and find the monster who is possessed by the dream of violently remaking the world.
If Lauren Beukes’s internationally bestselling The Shining Girls was a time-jumping thrill ride through the past, her Broken Monsters is a genre-redefining thriller about broken cities, broken dreams, and broken people trying to put themselves back together again.
“Exquisitely paced and impeccably controlled . . . An enormously satisfying novel that employs the best attributes of multiple genres to dramatize big ideas about art, the Internet and urban decay.”
Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes
Now, This is the Way It’s Done.
Broken Monsters, a horror story where truly horrible things happen, doesn’t exploit gore for the sake of titillation–yet there is gore in this book. Broken Monsters depicts and it set inside an urban homicide unit that truly feels like an urban homicide unit.–bad jokes, austere working conditions, jaded, tired officers, interested but usually not, with nary a tech savvy wunderkind or ruggedly handsome, all-knowing veteran in sight. Broken Monsters includes homeless people who aren’t desperate or mentally ill, and some well-off folks who are. It’s got teenagers that are teenagers, for better or worse.
Broken Monsters confronts headline stories from today’s media, feeds without screaming, (although screaming does come into play). Broken Monsters includes, as well, a Type 1 diabetic–a credible Type 1 diabetic. And that, my friends, is authenticity that other sensation-driven books lack.
This. Book. Is. Sensational.
It’s sensational AND it’s sensational. Broken Monsters includes shocking storylines, not all a part of the main horror story. The horrific parts of the book are truly awful, partially because they are not really about depravity and cruelty, although depraved and cruel things come from them; they are so bloody (literally) impersonal and yet so incredibly intimate. Other, more personal storylines are awful in other ways, above all, in their depiction of “mundanity.” When all the storylines, even those that had nothing to do with the others, pull together in an ever tightening knot, the tension ratchets you to the edge of your seat, afraid to turn the next page but breathlessly compelled to do just that.
To say Broken Monsters is well written seems an understatement. The setting of Detroit fits perfectly into this story, and provides a background that exploits the built-in assumptions and opinions that much of the world carry about that weary city, many of which are acknowledged in Broken Monsters yet without making the city–and especially its people–a scapegoat or easy pickings. The almost seamless transitions between what is real and what is surreal are handled so deftly that they almost get lost in the displays of atrocities that happen so swiftly, until the true focus of those atrocities is revealed and we are overwhelmed.
Incredibly well done.
I’m purposefully not laying out a plot or doing more than simply hint at a storyline because it would feel a bit disingenuous to do so; I would either be teasing or giving up way too much. Suffice it to say that this is a book of horror, a book of the supernatural, a detective/crime/thriller novel, and a kind of moral statement on society’s self-righteousness and our own sense of self-importance.
I’ll simply say that although there is one evil entity that develops throughout Broken Monsters, there’s a reason why the title reflects the plural.
Masterful.
This one will stay with you for a long time.
—Sharon Browning
“Dig it: what a brilliant crime-phantasmagoria novel this is!!!!! This splendid novel is THE new primer on urban decay to the nth degree. I unhesitatingly urge you to buy it and read it now!”
About Lauren Beukes
Lauren Beukes is the award-winning and internationally best-selling author of The Shining Girls, which has been adapted by AppleTV+, as well as Zoo City, Moxyland, Broken Monsters, and Afterland. Her novels have been published in twenty-four countries, and she’s also a screenwriter, comics writer, journalist and award-winning documentary maker. She lives in London with two trouble cats and her daughter.
You can connect with Lauren on her website, on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
Source: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/contributor/lauren-beukes/?lens=mulholland-books
Other Titles by Lauren Beukes
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Be sure and look at our other LitStack Recs for our recommendations on books you should read, as well as these reviews by Lauren Alwan, and these reviews by Rylie Fong, Allie Coker, and Sharon Browning.
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You can find and buy the books we recommend at the LitStack Bookshop on our list of LitStack Recs.
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