Broken Monsters
by Lauren Beukes (Goodreads Author)
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. The cops nickname him "Bambi," but 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 over-achieving teenage daughter, Layla, you commence a dangerous flirtation with a potential predator online. If you are the disgraced journalist, Jonno, you do whatever it takes to investigate what may become the most heinous crime story in memory. If you're Thomas Keen, you'll do what you can to keep clean, keep your head down, and try to help the broken and possibly visionary artist obsessed with setting loose The Dream, tearing reality, assembling the city anew.
If you're Detective Versado's over-achieving teenage daughter, Layla, you commence a dangerous flirtation with a potential predator online. If you are the disgraced journalist, Jonno, you do whatever it takes to investigate what may become the most heinous crime story in memory. If you're Thomas Keen, you'll do what you can to keep clean, keep your head down, and try to help the broken and possibly visionary artist obsessed with setting loose The Dream, tearing reality, assembling the city anew.
I came across this book in a Singaporean airport bookstore and couldn’t put it down (on a side note, said Singaporean airport bookstore gratifyingly well-stocked and current). The synopsis immediately had my attention, because what kind of sick psycho kills people and make ART out of their corpses? As I’m always a sucker for crime TV series, Broken Monsters sounds like something I would totally watch. By the time I finished this book, I have to say, it doesn’t disappoint.
The story is set in Detroit, the mostly defunct city that probably has no future. This bleak setting is in itself kind of creepy and claustrophobic, which works for the story because it needs some backdrop for homeless characters and those seeking a new life. Beukes’s description of this gloomy atmosphere really sets the mood for the whole story and its horror elements.
Gabriella Versado is a detective in the Detroit police department handed the case of “Bambi,” a dead half-boy-half-deer corpse. As the case unravels, more grotesque bodies are discovered; the weird part is that the victims are somehow artworks arranged for them to find. Amid all the hair-tearing frustration that comes with the investigation, Gabi also has to deal with her teenage daughter Layla’s shenanigans, like online vigilantism and revenge. Worse, when Layla tries to climb out of the huge mire of trouble she dug for herself, she becomes involved with the case and alerts the serial killer of her existence.
Speaking of the serial killer, he is an artist who never had his breakthrough, ever. Now he’s on the wrong side of youth and more than desperate, until an unknown entity ambiguously called “the dream” enters him and unleashes infinite creativity. The dream now controls his every move and his every kill, escalating quickly when his “artworks” wouldn’t come alive as new beings. The boy-deer is meant, in a twisted way, to prance up on his new deer legs into the woods. Of course it doesn’t work like that! Nevertheless, the dream plans on something big, something that will open the door to a new world, and it draws a door with pink chalk on every crime scene, which is one clue that eventually leads the cops onto it. The ultimate plan requires a messenger.
That messenger is actually social media, with its rapt attention at anything intriguing and odd. Its speaks-person is a frustrated journalist, Jonno, looking for a new beginning and a story in Detroit. Frankly, I think he’s looking at the wrong place, but Jonno wants to do a story on homeless people and the mysterious killer in town. Eventually he is kidnapped by the Dream, and as long as he keeps broadcasting its work, the Dream stays alive.
What is the point of this whole book, really? That social media is harmful and corrupting? Maybe. Beukes first brings up social media as a negative thing when Layla and her friend Cas are looking for pervs on the internet to catch. For instance, pedophiles can use chat-rooms or forums to get to know little kids, and teenage boys can drug a girl and record a video. But what is the dream, really? It is portrayed as some kind of demon who possesses people to do its will; attention is the only thing it needs. In much of the same way, we can interpret the dream as greedy, desperate ambition. Both the impoverished artist and the journalist Jonno need an audience to survive, and they can both go to extreme, even twisted lengths to achieve their dream. That’s my take on the book.
But really, even if “the dream” has no meaning, Broken Monsters is still a riveting book with twists and turns and creatively gruesome crimes to solve. Delightful, isn’t it?
