TILL WE BECOME MONSTERS BY AMANDA HEADLEE (BOOK REVIEW)

27/5/2021

A search for evidence to prove that the creatures of
folklore exist take a student into the darkest of places

Till We Become Monsters by Amanda Headlee
(Book Review by Tony Jones)

One of the blurbs of Amanda Headlee’s intriguing debut Till We Become Monsters uses the quote “Monsters exist and Korin Perrin knew this as truth because his grandmother told him so” with much of the success of the novel being built around the ambiguity of this big question. Coming in at a brief 226-pages it makes a memorable stab at keeping the reader guessing until the last fifty or pages. One could argue that the bloody climax does not exactly fit with what preceded it and even though it was still very enjoyable, I did not find it particularly convincing within the context of how the story is framed.

The action kicks off in March 1971 with Korin Perrin being read a story by his grandmother whom he loves dearly and in particular the folklore stories she tells him. He does not get on with his older brother Davis, who dominates the attention of his parents, but is disliked by the grandmother. However, two separate shocking incidents involving firstly their grandmother, then Davis, lead to a terrible family crisis which sends Korin into a mental hospital. This was part of an outstanding first fifty pages, which I found really eye-catching.

The two shocking incidents brings us to the first big theme of the novel: family dynamics. And boy-o-boy if you think your family is dysfunctional wait until you see the Perrins! For much of the time I could not make my mind up who was the most f***ed up, the parents or their incredibly unlikable children. That was one of the major weaknesses of the novel, both Korin and Davis were so incredibly self-centred and self-seeking once the story jumped to the adult stage, I could not care less about them. In fact, I wanted to give the parents a slap for bringing up two children so poorly and the boys for making such little effort to get on. Central characters need a certain amount of empathy for readers to connect to and the brothers missed it by a mile.

His fascinating with folklore is one of the reasons Korin ends up in hospital and this place was so unpleasant it made Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest look like a holiday camp. I found this sequence to be vaguely unbelievable, okay, it’s the 1970s, but I struggled to accept how horribly the boy was treated in this nasty place, which was more like a prison. At this stage I did wonder which direction the book was heading into, and by page-43 the events jump to March 1986 when Korin is in his early twenties and a star university student. The novel remains in this period with Korin torn on what to do his major dissertation on.

His love and fascination with folklore has never deserted him and in some way, he wants to write a paper which proves that some of the old tales are based on fact, however, he struggles to come up with an angle and goes round in circles. Inwardly, he has never forgotten the stories of changelings his grandmother told him and after more frustration his professor tells him to take a week off and visit his family to chill out. After his girlfriend Maeve, who is a Psychology graduate, inspires him he thinks he has something new to investigate. Meanwhile, he continues to whine and feel sorry for himself, possibly making himself one of the most irritating main characters I have come across in quite a while. Forever moaning about what his family never did for him, when he did nothing much for them either. If readers abandon Till We Become Monsters before the wild finish it will probably be because of this character, or his equally annoying brother.

The story is told in the third person from multiple points of view, including Maeve, his parents, Davis and a couple of other characters which appear later. Korin was not an unreliable narrator, but he was certainly disturbed, and you could argue not a lot happened in the plot once it reached the adult sequence. It had a whiff of Young Adult literature to it, but I doubt teenage readers would find Korin to be particularly engaging and Davis was just too one dimensional to take seriously. He was in his mid-twenties, still lived at home, had no job and had loser written all over him. The two most engaging characters, Tate and Addy, were a welcome antidote to proceedings later in the action, mainly because they gave the reader a break from the Perrins!

There was nothing at all wrong with the action style finish and there were some exciting and painful sequences which will have you wincing as the characters wander around in sub-zero Minnesota snowy temperatures. I guess, ancient evil can awaken anywhere, and you can decide whether it fits with the rest of the book. In the end everything goes full circle, and you find out who and what the real monster is. But within the context of this novel did the way the supernatural was introduced into the story work? I was not convinced, but I still found Till We Become Monsters to be an entertaining read and a solid first novel. But the moral of the story is do not believe everything your granny tells you!

I should also point out that the Advanced Reader Copy (ARC) provided by the publisher had a very irritating watermark in the book which blended too many of the characters into the white background. This was very annoying which reduced the enjoyment of the book and if it were not for the fact that the book was short, I would have given up. This is not the way to go about picking up reviews.

Tony Jones

Check out Amanda's guest post here
MY MANXOME FOE: THE JABBERWOCK BY AMANDA HEADLEE

"With her debut novel, Till We Become Monsters, Amanda Headlee raises the genre to a chilling new level. I recommend reading this one with all the lights on."—Phil Giunta, author of Like Mother, Like Daughters

Monsters exist and Korin Perrin knew this as truth because his grandmother told him so. Korin, raised in the shadow of his older brother Davis, is an imaginative child who believes his brother is a monster. After the death of their grandmother, seven-year-old Korin, blaming Davis for her demise, tries to kill him. Sixteen years following the attempt on Davis' life, racked with guilt, Korin comes to terms with the fact that Davis may not be the one who is the monster after all.

Past wrongs needing to be righted, Korin agrees to a hunting trip with his brother and father. But they, along with two friends, never make it to their destination. An accident along the way separates the hunters in the dark forests of Minnesota during the threat of an oncoming blizzard. As the stranded hunters search for each other and safety, an ancient evil wakes.