The Monster of Elendhaven by Jennifer Giesbrecht
My rating: 4/5 cats
this is a vicious little novella that ends each kiss with a bite.
it is a perfect october book, which means i picked it up a few days too early, but YOU should work it into your halloweeny spooktober book stack because it is short and creepy and an excellent pick for the season.
if i try to do a plotty review of this, it will quickly become overcomplicated for you and overwhelming for me, and i’ll end up sounding like a little kid describing a nightmare.
and it IS a pointy little nightmare of a book—dark and violent and vengeful. it’s got a sort of apocalyptic victorian vibe, if that’s even a genre, full of urban decay and impending doom, where some are still clinging to the false hope of progress, so confident in their powers of persuasion that they underestimate—see, and i’m already off into NO ONE CARES, KAREN territory.
in short: it’s about a man who is not a man; a gothic golem shaped by cruelty, curious and homicidal, drawn to power and finding his purpose beside (and also inside, [lewd chuckle]) a man who is more than a man, who needs a morally flexible cohort to help fulfill his monumental revenge fantasy.
and it’s gonna get murdery.
”[T]here’s nothing to fear from the end of the world. Annihilation is a fire that cleanses what it burns. For a corrupted world, apocalypse is the only hope for redemption.”
it is a horrible little book. by which i mean: i enjoyed it very much.
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