Monstrilio

Monstrilio is a hard novel for me to pin down. If I had to attach some labels to it I'd say literary fiction with a dash of horror.

It's a story rooted in loss: Magos and Joseph's son Santiago dies suddenly; Magos is enthralled by a tale about regrowing a child from its heart and so cuts out a piece of Santiago's lung from his body to do the same. As she feeds it and grows this lung, it becomes a monster that she treats as her son, and names Monstrilio. The book is divided into four parts from different perspectives: Magos, longtime friend Lena, Joseph, and finally Monstrilio.

But it's not just about grief, it's a story about family and relationships with the monstrous. Magos lives in denial and tries to believe her lung monster Monstrilio is her child Santiago again. Joseph speedruns acceptance and tries to forcibly conform his own life and Monstrilio into a facade of normality.

It's satisfying to me that the book ends from the fractured perspective of Monstrilio, rather than through the projecting biases of the adults in his life. It's interesting to see how the adults largely try to cover for Monstrilio's (at times horrible) actions and coerce him into humanity, while Monstrilio himself covers his own monstrous feelings from the adults and tries to exist in an ill-fitting human world.

I was quite engrossed by this book, although it is definitely quite (deliberately) uncomfortable at points and the book doesn't shy away from (usually off page) gore.

I thought this was going to be about a monster who got out of control. I mean, it was, but it was mostly about how people try to ignore things. They ignore grief, their sexuality, their nature. The writing is gorgeous. It's the best thing I've read in a while.

This book was not what I expected. And luckily I didn't really have expectations beyond hopefully a good horror story.
This book is heavy with grief and follows quite a fantastical tale or folklore where the grieving mother Magos cuts out a piece of her dead son's lung and feeds it, until it grows and develops into something quite different. The whole book is very heavy and in a way dragging as a result. Whilst we got the hear the progression of the story via different perspectives, They were all surprisingly similar, and showed mostly unconditional love towards M who develops into a version of Dracula, I would say. But something quite different further. I sort of enjoyed the ethical dilemmas there, but equally found them very unmoving and distant from myself. I would have happily seen M killed from the first moment onwards, as the logic was undefeatable, and the monster which attacked Magos' own mother is clearly not meant for this world.
I finished this book with a bit of a relief, both that it was over, and that M decided for his own fate for once.
This book tried, perhaps excessively, to incorporate some current topics to the story with more fluid sexuality from various characters.
Even though I see this as an origin story for another fairly gruesome character, the delivery left me quite flat and did not take me along on the ride emotionally as I would have hoped.