A Cosmology of Monsters

Shaun Hamill
Completed 6/10/2021, Reviewed 6/11/2021
5 stars

I couldn’t believe this was a debut novel.  It’s so well-written and so scary and oh so very weird.  The trend these days seems to be weirdness based on HP Lovecraft weirdness, and this is one of them.  It’s a story about a dysfunctional family and their encounter with monsters and the strange dimension they come from.  This book grabbed me right at the beginning and never let me go.  When I got to the end, I didn’t want it to wrap up.  It did, and quite nicely as well.  It’s not that I love stories of dysfunction, but it was such a damned well-crafted universe that I wanted to treasure every second in it.  And it was hard to do that because the tension kept me reading very quickly and prevented me from putting it down when I was exhausted.  I discovered this book from one of the authors I follow on Twitter, but I can’t remember which one.  Whoever it was, I’m so glad I followed their recommendation.  

The story begins with a woman named Margaret who marries a man for love rather than the rich man who was courting her.  They have two children when they decide to made a haunted house experience called The Wandering Dark.  The husband Harry starts having seizures as the opening of the house nears and Margaret finds out she’s pregnant again.  Harry dies and young Noah grows up without knowing his father.  The horror part of the story is that various members of the family see a wolf-like humanoid creature in a robe, but each ignores it until one day when Noah goes to the window to get a closer look at the creature.  Rather than react with fear, he speaks to the creature which responds by writing in chalk on the sidewalk “Friend” “Help”.  The story gets weirder as Noah’s relationship with the monster grows and children around town start disappearing.

Hamill creates extremely vivid, realistic characters.  Noah is the narrator, telling the story of how his parents met, their life before him, and the family’s life after he is born and meets the monster.  The story covers about thirty years (in only 325 pages) but we really become well acquainted with each family member at the different stages of their lives.  Margaret and Harry don’t have a fairy tale marriage even though they married for love.  The eldest daughter Sydney loves her father more than her mother.  Eunice is a depressed, suicidal middle child who thinks the world of her little brother Noah.  Noah saves Eunice’s suicide notes.  And he is a shy kid whose need for interpersonal relationships is satisfied by the Monster.  We also explore the monster’s personality as it becomes closer to Noah, even though it only communicates by writing simple words in chalk on the sidewalk.  

The world building is great as well.  The story takes place in a small Texas town, though fortunately it’s not written in southern drawl or slang.  (I had enough of that with the accents in the last book I read.)  It could actually be Anytown, USA.  The alternate dimension of the Monster is also well-conceived and described.  Vines which pierce the body to turn a human into a monster are particularly gruesome.  

I want to say so much more, but it gives too much away.  So I’ll leave with what I’ve said.  There are just so many terrific scenes that evoke sadness, empathy, uncomfortableness, tension, and fear.  There’s a little humor here and there to break up the tension.  I give the book five stars out of five because I became totally enrapt in the story, felt everyone’s pain, and put my kindle down in fear, then quickly picked it up again to get right back into it.  This is simply a terrific horror story that could be called literature because it’s so well written.  I find it interesting that in his Acknowledgments, Hamill thanks Ethan Canin as one of his MFA professors, a little-known but highly praised general fiction author who I absolutely love.  I’ve read most of his books and love how he creates ordinary, realistic people and situations.  It’s like I’ve entered a second generation of greatness.  I look forward to reading more of Hamill’s works even though I don’t generally get around to reading as much horror as I used to.