Bibliophile: Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes

Broken Monsters

by Lauren Beukes

Harper Collins

Motor City Detroit is now a decaying ruin of the American Dream. The ghost town is populated by derelict factories and people with no futures. It is also a mecca for artists who are turning six abandoned houses into Dream Houses with their art instillations.

Detective Gabi Versado is rather jaded by all the dead bodies she’s seen in the last eight years but even violence has its creative limits. She is horrified by the latest discovery of a half human/half animal corpse and wonders what kind of monster she hunting down.

Meanwhile, her daughter Layla is flirting with dangerous things – experimenting with drugs, trying to entrap paedophiles with her friend Cas and going to the big night-time arty party in the Dream Houses.

Unlike usual crime fiction, the killer is known from the beginning. Clayton is an artist who finds new uses for unwanted things. Things haven’t been going too well for him lately and sometimes he has no memory of doing something.

It’s as if he his muddled mind is being taken over by a very powerful dream, leaving memories “like silverfish that skittered away into dark corners”. At first the dream only possesses the killer but people converge in an abandoned building, the dream intensifies and seeps into other people’s bodies. As the nightmare grows by feeding on inner demons, local DJ Jen Q and boyfriend and wannabe journalist Jonno are recording everything. This thoroughly deserves to be one of Stephen King’s top ten books of the year.

Lezly Herbert