Monster Love

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The revelation of Davis’s abuse made Cleage want to “break his albums, burn his tapes and scratch up his CDs. Then - we start to get into the realms of the unbelievable with the weird psychic relationship and I lost interest rather. A heart-poppingly empowering, edge-of the-bed story, about how, sometimes, it’s only when we face our fears, that we find out there was nothing to be scared of, after all. Yes, the story is awful, yes, Brendan and Sherilyn are true monsters (but the book sheds some light as to how those two "monsters" are themselves the product and victims of monstruous parents, although this is no excuse), yes, the mere idea of little Samantha dead since weeks in her cage is gruesome - but it is superbly constructed.

If you liked We Need to Talk About Kevin you’ll love this’ Harper’s Bazaar’A chilling love story with a twist as compelling as it is disturbing’ ElleCarol Topolski is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist.

Your first draft is your raw material which will need shaping, polishing, diminishing, aggrandising. It’s way past bedtime o’clock in Cutesville and Love Monster is the only one who’s wide awake… Or is he? The story is this: He is subject to forces greater than himself, forces that are beyond his control. This book was left behind by a guest, and while I usually still well clear of this general genre, it's thin and I needed something a bit brainless.

Ian Mark is an author and monster hunter who spends his time wrestling krakens, hypnotising bogeymen with an eyeball on a string of spaghetti, and writing about his adventures to entertain young monster hunters all around the world. The biggest one being the characters at the centre of the drama, Sheralyn and Brendan both narcissistic, shallow control freaks, obsessed with outward appearance. Her many previous roles include music festival organiser, advertising executive, teacher, nursery school director, director of a rape crisis centre and refuge for battered women, probation officer and film censor.The first half was amazing - it was like Stephen King and Gillian Flynn had a baby, and every POV kept me glued to the page because it build an amazing tension. In better hands, this book could have been a disturbing psychological thriller addressing a serious issue in a hitherto unexplored manner; rather it turned out that a heinous crime was used as the catalyst for a salacious throwaway romance story. You were also a kind of priest, channeling and translating the word and the work of the he-man auteur.

The rest of the book just felt like padding: all the things you learn from their family and friends and co-workers and neighbors and parole officers that give insight into who Brendan and Sherilyn are and why they might have become the way they are feel clumsy and predictable compared to the one paragraph where they make up show tunes parodies while they're building the cage. No-one escapes a myriad of crimes, nor can they escape the crime that sits at the centre of the novel.Until they go to prison and apparently develop superpowers which allow them to hear one another's thoughts (I'll be fair to Topolski and say that it was at least inferred a couple of times throughout the book, but it turned far too much towards the magical-realistic and the "love makes everything better" for a novel about two such sick horrendous people, i don't care if they were raped as children, stick your lame and convenient plotting), and then to journey towards an ending which has the possibility of a heaven for these two. She knew that she “wasn’t supposed to love this work, or this man” but her love of the films did not grow from any forgiveness of the crime.

Told through the Gutteridges' voices, and those of their families, neighbours, and those who will come across them in the aftermath, this perverse love story hurtles to the heart of evil - the evil that could be anyone's next door neighbour. It's not a whodunit and it's not a thriller; it's a portrayal of l'amour fou between two sociopaths and the manner in which they will protect their love. Topolski seems unable to give the reader breath, and whist I can admire her literary audacity, I felt that I was being suffocated.In the course of writing of a people struck by a plague in his inimitable, difficult, eccentric style, he explores the notion of community, the nature of exclusion, of identity, the tentacular hold of implacable governments and how friable civilisation’s veneer really is. It almost reminded me of the thing that Sherilyn references when she says about the trashy magazines with stories like "I Fell In Love With My Best Friend's Ferret. We love the Love Monster series of books so I was excited to read Love Monster and the Perfect Present. If you're a parent* (hell, even if you're not a parent) and you read this and it doesn't affect you in some way then nothing will.