“The dream will try again.”

If you could breathe this book in deep it would smell like earth and oil. I think hurt sometimes smells like that: organic and sticky, a sharp sting in the back of your throat. There’s a whole lot of pain in this one, it’s inescapable. The overarching pièce de résistance of “Monsters” is the character creation and descriptions. For a book that explodes into a surreal nightmare within the last 50 or so pages, after having traversed the gritty crime drama genre for 90% of the novel, these characters are the real deal. Real people that do real shitty things. Beukes is like the meme of the guy in “Birdbox” holding our eyes open to witness something shattering and awful. The concept construction was elaborate and thorough, Beukes never loses control, even in the sudden narrative flip.

Beukes is a white woman from South Africa and included an incredibly diverse cast of characters in this book. I think that in itself does imbue important discourse about race representation but I don’t agree that it invalidates the story or encourages “pointless social commentary.” The book is set in Detroit? It’s not long division.

4/5 This was like the most provocative, season finale episode of “Law and Order” except they wrote it on mescaline.