A grieving mother cuts out a piece of her dead 11-year-old son’s lung and, with the force of her grief, grows it into a carnivorous humanoid—who, in turn, grows up and tries to be a man. From the very moment I read the description of the book, I knew I had to read it, and it absolutely did not disappoint.
This is an absolutely gorgeous book in so many respects. The language. The plotting. Its dissertation on grief and family and Otherness. I love how it uses the horror genre to tell a disturbing and surreal story while also pulling from other literary forms and integrating humor and folklore.
There’s another reason it appealed to me, though: I love to travel, and Monstrilio is set in Mexico City, Brooklyn, Berlin, and Manhattan—and the setting is especially important here. Córdova does an incredible job of imbuing each setting with a unique flavor that made me want to hop on a plane to go there immediately.
I finished this book in Venice, Italy—nearly 4,500 miles from my home—and it made me acutely aware of my own Otherness in that moment. I recommend this book to everyone I talk to about books.
A "genuinely scary" horror debut written in "prose so beautiful you won't want to rush" about a boy who transforms into a monster, a monster who tries to be a man, and the people who love him in every form he takes (Ana Reyes)
Grieving mother Magos cuts out a piece of her deceased eleven-year-old son Santiago's lung. Acting on fierce maternal instinct and the dubious logic of an old folktale, she nurtures the lung until it gains sentience, growing into the carnivorous little Monstrilio she keeps hidden within the walls of her family's decaying Mexico City estate. Eventually, Monstrilio…
I’ve always been a horror fan, even when I was a little kid—and so a tween who fancies herself destined to be a movie scream queen, someone who has an encyclopedic knowledge of horror movies (and campy B movies at that), is so relatable to me.
The entire plot and all the little details are a love letter to horror films, from the names of director Maximus Price’s films to the squid-like creatures who attach themselves to the faces of the Price Manor’s staff. But more than that, each of the main characters, including the manor house, is so well-developed.
It’s a sweet and funny book with just enough scares to be the perfect first horror book for a middle-grade reader.
Fans of Ghost Squad will love this lightly scary creature feature standalone novel about a tween aspiring horror movie actress who pairs up with the twin children of her favorite director to defeat zombifying octopus-like creatures!
Halle dreams of becoming a scream queen. She practices her loudest scream every day and has learned a lot from studying the horror movies of her favorite director, Maximus Price. Maximus lives just outside town, and when the chance to go to his home arises, Halle grabs it with both hands. She doesn’t realize that real life horrors await her at Price Manor.
I’m an absolute folklore freak, so Linsmeier’s destiny-rich story involving a town where special roses bloom all year, and the legends attached to the town and her family is just a hundred percent my thing.
It’s a very charming story with a great mystery at the center, and the gothic feel that Linsmeier creates is so wonderfully creepy! The relationship between Kit and her grandmother Agatha is particularly interesting and complicated in a deliciously fraught way.
I read this book late into the night, trying to guess at the ending—and was wholly surprised by how the plot wrapped up.
A dark YA fantasy debut perfect for fans of House of Hollow and Small Favors. In the wake of her father's death, a teen girl discovers a side of her family she didn't know existed, and is pulled into a dark—and ancient—bargain she is next in line to fulfill.
Kit’s father always told her he had no family, but his sudden death revealed the truth. Now Kit has a grandmother she never knew she had—Agatha Starling—and an invitation to visit her father’s hometown, Rosemont.
And Rosemont is picture perfect: the famed eternal roses bloom all year, downtown is straight out…
Lemon Ziegler wants to attend college, but that’s impossible now that she’s expected to impersonate her rural town’s lake monster for life. Her family has been secretly faking sightings for generations, all to keep the tourists coming. Without Lemon, the town dies, and she can’t disappoint her grandparents . . . or tell her best friends about any of it. That includes Troy Ramirez, covertly in love with Lemon for years, afraid to ruin their friendship by confessing his feelings.
When a very real monster is discovered in the lake, secrets must fall by the wayside. Determined to stop the monster, Lemon and her best friends are the only thing standing between Devil’s Elbow and a monster out for blood.
