Allison Hurd's Reviews > Bad Monkeys

So here's my thing. Matt Ruff makes me mad. He's so good at writing, and he's so multifaceted, and also I only started reading things by him like a couple years ago, and I am blaming him for that oversight.

Anyways this book was a lot of fun!

CONTENT WARNING: (view spoiler)[ pedophilia, serial killers and rapists, mental health disorders, parental abuse, drug use (hide spoiler)]

Things that were fun:

-The ourboros of psychosis. We meet a woman in a psych ward. I still don't know what, if anything, was real. In everything we learn there are a few touchstones and they create a disturbing picture of a mind that has lots of reasons to be broken.

-The frenetic storytelling. So different in tone and style than Lovecraft Country, the only other by this author I've read. I'm always impressed by chameleon authors. Note though, I don't think if I had read this first I would have been as impressed.

Things I did not love:

-The content. So, this is a book about people who hurt people. And the ways people hurt people, and the reason people become people who hurt people, tend not to be pleasant things. You never hear the true crime show where the person had a perfectly safe and happy childhood surrounded by trustworthy and caring adults, a cohort of age appropriate and similarly happy kids, trips to Disney World and a doting golden retriever.

-The end. I didn't buy it. It was too obvious and it broke some of the immersion of the earlier chaos and mystery.

3.5 rounded up because I'm still angry that Matt Ruff can write these things, and that no one made me read him sooner. Shame on all of you ;-)