Delicious Monsters
Liselle Sambury
Toxic Monsters
As I was reading Delicious Monsters, I made the following note to myself at 29%, "So far, every character in this novel is hateful." That did not change as I read on. In the whole book there are two characters who are pretty nice guys, one a fairly important character and one minor, but aside from those two, everyone is odious. It would be fair to point out that they are hateful mostly because they have been treated badly in their pasts, and their current sadness/cruelty/arrogance is an understandable result of that past treatment. They were treated badly by other hateful characters, who often are hateful because they were treated badly by other hateful characters, and so on.
The main point-of-view characters are Daisy and Brittney. Daisy is the one on whom the story centers. She sees ghosts and has a bad relationship with her mother Grace. Grace is a Bad Person, full stop. Delicious Monsters is a haunted house story. Grace inherits the haunted house from her brother-in-law, and she and Daisy go to live there, and Bad Things Happen. (Of course. If you've read any horror fiction at all, you knew that was coming.) Brittney is a YouTube-famous videographer ten years later who, with her partner Jayden, seeks to document the things that happened to Daisy in the haunted house. Brittney has a toxic relationship with her own mother, who herself has a history with the haunted house in question. Brittney despises everyone in her life (with the possible exception of Jayden) and trusts no one. [spoiler1]
Most of the book is told from Daisy's point of view, but chapters told from Brittney's point of view are interpolated. These have the effect of foreshadowing for the reader things that became known only after what happened with Daisy went down.
Delicious Monsters was a hard book to get into. That's partly because there is no real story visible until about the 60% mark, when a very important character steps into the story in a major way and we begin to learn who and what she is. (We meet her fairly early, but her part in the story is minor, or appears to be, until about 60%. I'm talking about Ivy.)
When I say "There is no real story visible..." in the first half, I don't mean that nothing happens. Things happen -- the problem is that nothing happens that makes you want to keep reading. That is largely because most of the characters are awful people.
I am puzzled by the title Delicious Monsters. Not by the second word -- there are plenty of monsters. But there was nothing in the novel, not the monsters or anything else, to which I would apply the word "delicious". "Cruel", "vengeful", "toxic", "sadistic" would fit.
[spoiler2]
I thank NetGalley and Simon and Schuster Canada for an advance reader copy of Delicious Monsters. This review expresses my honest opinions.
Not even Jayden -- although she claims to trust him, Brittney shows by her actions that she in fact does not.
I had mixed feelings about the ending. At the very end of Delicious Monsters, happy endings implausibly break out all over. Daisy and Brittney each get one. From a purely literary point of view, I would be inclined to hate this. However, I was so traumatized by 500 pages of unrelieved pain that the appearance of a little sunshine and cheer in the final pages felt good.