Lauren Beukes - Broken Monsters

[I'm Murrin]

Lauren Beukes latest novel is Broken Monsters, which came out in South Africa earlier this month and will be released in the US and UK on the 31st July. Her previous novel, The Shining Girls, was one of the best new books I read in 2013, and was a big hit in general (in part thanks to a large marketing push from her publisher) - I will definately be running out to buy my copy immediately after work tomorrow.

Here's the synopsis:

Detective Gabriella Versado has seen a lot of bodies. But this one is unique even by Detroit's standards: half boy, half deer, somehow fused together. As stranger and more disturbing bodies are discovered, how can the city hold on to a reality that is already tearing at its seams?

If you're Detective Versado's geeky teenage daughter, Layla, you commence a dangerous flirtation with a potential predator online. If you're desperate freelance journalist Jonno, you do whatever it takes to get the exclusive on a horrific story. If you're Thomas Keen, known on the street as TK, you'll do what you can to keep your homeless family safe--and find the monster who is possessed by the dream of violently remaking the world.

If Lauren Beukes's internationally bestselling The Shining Girls was a time-jumping thrill ride through the past, her Broken Monsters is a genre-redefining thriller about broken cities, broken dreams, and broken people trying to put themselves back together again.

Anyone else excited about this one?

[Wildling]

Never heard of it or her previous book before but it seems interesting.

[Avatar]

I really liked The Shining Girls (read on Murrin's recommendation), so all her books, (two earlier ones and this new one) are on my "to buy" list.

--A

[I'm Murrin]

I'm about halfway through the book now, and it's really got its hooks in me.

The speculative angle is a lot less upfront in this one than the time travel house from The Shining Girls. For a while I was thinking this might be a straight thriller. The weird stuff starts off subtle, creeping in around the edges, until one scene I got to not long ago where it's pretty explicitly unreal.

Like The Shining Girls and Chicago, Broken Monsters is in many ways a book about its setting, Detroit - the urban decay, the crime, the race and class issues, the art scene. Beukes puts a lot of research into her depictions of these places, learns the history and the people.

[I'm Murrin]

I finished Broken Monsters earlier today. It's a very good book, but I can't help feeling the climax didn't quite work for me. I feel as if the book could have gone on beyond the ending it had, and gone in some more interesting places by doing so. Some things suggested in the ending are tantilising with the possibility of what could have been done.

Spoiler

TK was a slightly underused character overall, and in the article published at the end you see the suggestion that he intended to try and take the dream within himself, to find a way to control it. That could have been interesting.

In all I think the release of the dream from Clayton's body could have been a big, complex thing, a twist that transformed the conflict of the story into something new and far stranger. Instead it all ended rather quickly and easily.

*True Detective spoiler* It made me think of that moment in the final episode of True Detective, when Rust has a vision of a swirling galaxy in the air in the killer's lair, and it looks like something strange and beautiful is going to happen, as hinted from the earlier stuff about Carcosa and the Yellow King... and then it ends, and it's just another hallucination, and the killer is just an ordinary man.

I did enjoy Broken Monsters a lot, and I still recommend it - Beukes is very good at what she does - but I would recommend The Shining Girls ahead of it.

One additional comment, on the UK cover: This was already my least favourite of the various editions of the book, and after reading it I really don't like what they did for the cover of the UK edition. A woman lying curled up on the floor is a very lazy, generic way to advertise "this book is a thriller", and has nothing at all to do with the plot of the book.