Monstrum by Lottie Mills

Book Review

Melody Bowles

Monstrum is a surreal collection of stories about humans and monsters and how they interact with each other. The story’s horrors tend to originate from the humans rather than the ‘monsters’. It’s not a particularly optimistic outlook on humanity, but one that rings true. For example, in The Cuckoo, a strange child comes into the protagonist’s house, magics her parents into treating her as her sister, takes her food, her room, and her bed and thoroughly usurps her from her own life. You can perhaps understand the protagonist’s reaction to that situation being attempted murder…

There is a particular focus on parent-child relationships, which re-occurs throughout the collection. It was refreshing to read stories where the focus was on familial relationships rather than romances, although The Mirror bucks the trend and offers a rather sweet romantic story among the doom and gloom. Opener The Changeling is about a mother accepting her ‘daughter’ must fly away from her, whereas The Bear-Children is about another daughter unwillingly separated from her father. The Toymaker’s Daughter, one of my favourite stories, focuses on a mother creating a perfect toy clone of her daughter, who she comes to treasure more than the real one. It’s chilling and feels like a great commentary on how we often fail to meet our parents’ expectations.

I must also mention the final story in the collection, The Merman. This offers yet another note of optimism, as the couple in the story rescue the titular merman and try to protect him from their town’s violent residents. I feel like the tone here is perfect, as it showcases both the light and dark sides of humanity.

The prose style is clean and tidy, not a word wasted, and it feels like the line has been meticulously edited. This means the stories clip along at a good pace, lingering only where they need to. Read Monstrum for a thoughtful collection of stories about otherness and the way we react to it. It’s a dark read, but the stories are put together with care and empathy.