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0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 18 weeks
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 18 weeks
A "genuinely scary" horror debut written in "prose so beautiful you won't want to rush" about a boy who transforms into a monster, a monster who tries to be a man, and the people who love him in every form he takes (Ana Reyes) Grieving mother Magos cuts out a piece of her deceased eleven-year-old son Santiago's lung. Acting on fierce maternal instinct and the dubious logic of an old folktale, she nurtures the lung until it gains sentience, growing into the carnivorous little Monstrilio she keeps hidden within the walls of her family's decaying Mexico City estate. Eventually, Monstrilio begins to resemble the Santiago he once was, but his innate impulses-though curbed by his biological and chosen family's communal care-threaten to destroy this fragile second chance at life. A thought-provoking meditation on grief, acceptance, and the monstrous sides of love and loyalty, Gerardo Sámano Cordova blends bold imagination and evocative prose with deep emotional rigor. Told in four acts that span the globe from Brooklyn to Berlin, Monstrilio offers, with uncanny clarity, a cathartic and precise portrait of being human.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      January 16, 2023
      A monster takes the place of a dead child in Mexican writer Sámano Córdova’s sly and unsettling debut. Santiago, 11, dies from an unspecified illness while convalescing in Upstate New York. “Her son was alive, and now he isn’t. How dull,” the author writes of Magos, the mother, who feels robbed of a sense of drama: she’d previously imagined Santiago dying in her arms in a crowded mall as she became “a Pietá.” She keeps a piece of his lung in a jar as a memento mori, and when they return to Mexico City, the family’s housekeeper tells Magos a story about a woman who kept and fed a young child’s heart and another child grew in its place. Magos then spoons some broth into the jar, and by the following morning, the lung has begun growing. Magos keeps feeding the lung until it breaks out of the jar, then bites off part of her thumb. Eventually, the lung grows to be the size of a child, and Magos names him Monstrilio. Her husband gets Monstrilio a cat tower for him to perch on, though their creation proves less domesticated than they’d hoped. While the prose is a bit flat, Sámano Córdova does a good job elucidating the contours of grief and love. This creepy work of psychological horror gives readers plenty to chew on.

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  • English

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