A Monster Calls
Patrick Ness, 2011
Fantasy Young adultHorrorContemporary fiction
A boy is visited by a monster who tells him stories—and demands the truth he cannot speak. A dark fable about grief, rage and what stories carry.
Feels like grief, dread and curiosity. About morality and love.
A page from the book
The particular loneliness of being looked past, not looked at.
There was once an invisible man who had grown tired of being unseen. It was not that he was actually invisible. It was that people had become used to not seeing him.And if no one sees you, are you really there at all?" Patrick Ness.The idea came from Siobhan Dowd, who died of cancer before writing it; Patrick Ness finished it at her editor's request, with Jim Kay's illustrations.
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Questions readers ask
- What is A Monster Calls like?
- Feels like grief, dread and curiosity. About morality and love.
- What should I read after A Monster Calls?
- If you liked A Monster Calls, try Mr. Mercedes (Stephen King), The Nickel Boys (Colson Whitehead) and Yol (Cormac McCarthy).
A taste of the feed
A belief system built out of certainty and dust.
Every religion lies. Every moral precept is a delusion. Even the stars are a mirage. The truth is darkness, and the only thing that matters is making a statement before one enters it. Cutting the skin of the world and leaving a scar. That’s all history is, after all: scar tissue.
Mr. Mercedes · Stephen King
All the futures a single building can quietly erase.
The boys could have been many things had they not been ruined by that place. Doctors who cured diseases or perform brain surgery, inventing shit that saves lives. Run for president. All those lost geniuses - sure not all of them were geniuses, Chickie Pete for example was not solving special relativity - but they had been denied even the simple pleasure of being ordinary. Hobbled and handicapped before the race even began, never figuring out how to be normal.
The Nickel Boys · Colson Whitehead
What it feels like to describe something you know is already gone.
Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
Yol · Cormac McCarthy
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