Monstrilio

Overall I'm not sure I quite grasped the central idea the author was reaching for. People react in different, unpredictable ways to grief and will do things they never would in their ordinary life, but is Monkey's Paw/Pet Sematery what we're going for here? Santiago/Monstrilio/M was always caught between various lives and his family was always trying to force him into a role nature didn't intend, but he was an inherently unnatural/magical creation. Will he be any more comfortable as Monstrilio than he was as M? M's violence is the price of trying to force Monstrilio to be human, what will be the consequence of the ending?

I thought Lena's section was the strongest and Joseph's dragged.

It's a literary convention in queer fiction that every character is queer (for example, until Joseph's chapters, I saw no hint that he was bisexual, but then no one was surprised when he dated and married a man), but you just kind of have to take that as a genre convention.

Listened to the audiobook in one sitting on a long car trip. I thought the femme narrator was better than the masc one. The masc narrator's voice felt too deep for the characters, and sometimes emphasized the wrong word in a sentence.

Monstrilio is a hard novel for me to pin down. If I had to attach some labels to it I'd say literary fiction with a dash of horror.

It's a story rooted in loss: Magos and Joseph's son Santiago dies suddenly; Magos is enthralled by a tale about regrowing a child from its heart and so cuts out a piece of Santiago's lung from his body to do the same. As she feeds it and grows this lung, it becomes a monster that she treats as her son, and names Monstrilio. The book is divided into four parts from different perspectives: Magos, longtime friend Lena, Joseph, and finally Monstrilio.

But it's not just about grief, it's a story about family and relationships with the monstrous. Magos lives in denial and tries to believe her lung monster Monstrilio is her child Santiago again. Joseph speedruns acceptance and tries to forcibly conform his own life and Monstrilio into a facade of normality.

It's satisfying to me that the book ends from the fractured perspective of Monstrilio, rather than through the projecting biases of the adults in his life. It's interesting to see how the adults largely try to cover for Monstrilio's (at times horrible) actions and coerce him into humanity, while Monstrilio himself covers his own monstrous feelings from the adults and tries to exist in an ill-fitting human world.

I was quite engrossed by this book, although it is definitely quite (deliberately) uncomfortable at points and the book doesn't shy away from (usually off page) gore.