A New England towns oldest resident dies leaving no known surviving family. His journals end up at the university where a professor loans them to a writer friend. In the first three folios, we learn of young Will Henry whose father and mother died in a terrible house fire leaving him to the care of his fathers employerWarthrop. Warthrop is a monstrumologist. He studies monsters, and people arrive in the middle of the night for his help. One night a grave robber arrives with the body of a young girl wrapped in the horrifying embrace of an anthropophagusa creature with no head and a mouth full of shark-like teeth in the middle of his chest. Will Henry, as the assistant apprentice monstrumologist, soon finds himself sucked into the secret horror found in his hometown.
More than a delicious fright, beautiful language, and lifelike characters though, the narrator, being an older man looking back on his youth, brings to light several serious real-life questions that there arent any easy answers to, but it is lovely to read about within literature. Youll be reading along, enjoying the terror and horror and wit of the main story, then stumble upon a passage like this:
Perhaps that is our doom, our human curse, to never really know one another. We erect edifices in our minds about the flimsy framework of word and deed, mere totems of the true person, who, like the gods to whom the temples were built, remains hidden. We understand our own construct; we know our own theory; we loved our own fabrication. Stilldoes the artifice of our affection make our love any less real? (page 362)
And you stop, and you close the book, and you think about it, and maybe you cry a little bit, then you get back into it to see how Will Henry does against the monsters, but that thought, that beauty, that fact that someone else on the planet has wondered the same thing as you (only put it quite a bit better) sticks with you afterward. And that is what takes good writing and characterization into the land of exquisite storytelling.
Frankly, I think everyone should read this book.
Check out my full review.
More than a delicious fright, beautiful language, and lifelike characters though, the narrator, being an older man looking back on his youth, brings to light several serious real-life questions that there arent any easy answers to, but it is lovely to read about within literature. Youll be reading along, enjoying the terror and horror and wit of the main story, then stumble upon a passage like this:
Perhaps that is our doom, our human curse, to never really know one another. We erect edifices in our minds about the flimsy framework of word and deed, mere totems of the true person, who, like the gods to whom the temples were built, remains hidden. We understand our own construct; we know our own theory; we loved our own fabrication. Stilldoes the artifice of our affection make our love any less real? (page 362)
And you stop, and you close the book, and you think about it, and maybe you cry a little bit, then you get back into it to see how Will Henry does against the monsters, but that thought, that beauty, that fact that someone else on the planet has wondered the same thing as you (only put it quite a bit better) sticks with you afterward. And that is what takes good writing and characterization into the land of exquisite storytelling.
Frankly, I think everyone should read this book.
Check out my full review.
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