Joe's Reviews > Broken Monsters

If I'm ever asked, "Name an otherwise sane novel that went completely bug fuck nuts for you in the end," I can now answer, Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes.

I do not want to write a bad review of this book. I can put it off for a while because for 374 pages, this is a terrific police procedural and thriller, with well-drawn characters, solid dialogue and strong atmosphere. Published in 2014 on the heels of The Shining Girls, Beukes cuts glass with her research once again. The acknowledgments read like an expert witness list for a major criminal case.

Broken Monsters gets off to a bang with Beukes introducing her major characters in unusual, intricately examined settings:

-- Gabriella Versado, "Gabi," is a veteran DPD detective and a divorced mother of one teenage girl. She doesn't give nearly enough attention to her daughter Layla because she spends all her time on the job, investigating things like the body of a 14-year-old black male discovered in an alley, his torso cut in two and his upper trunk glued to the hind legs of a fawn.

-- Jonno Haim is a recent transplant in Detroit, a freelance journalist who sabotaged his career and his love life in New York and is looking to renew himself in a city of industrial ruin. He ends up in the bed of a braided DJ named Jen Q he meets at a party and believes this could be love. Using his new girlfriend's connections in the Detroit arts scene, Jonno launches a news service.

-- Thomas Keen "TK," is a homeless vagrant with a hundred different hustles to stay alive, one being to enter foreclosed homes or businesses and salvage all he can for cash. Convicted of first degree murder in the shooting of the man who beat and killed his mother, TK never adjusted to life on the outside, but working with a local shelter, is trying to do the right thing.

-- Layla Versado reads Shakespeare for fun and is a self-described colossal dork. Active in theater arts, the teen spends most of her time with her best friend Cassandra, a cool white girl new in town who actively rejects the popular kids in school for Layla's friendship. Layla's relationship with her father, an ex-cop turned private security consultant in Atlanta, has turned brittle.

-- Clayton Broom is an artist working manual labor jobs when his work isn't selling. Age 53, work isn't as easy to come by any more and Clayton fixates on a woman he spent one night with named Louanne, who's returned to Michigan and is living out of her car. The two-year-old traveling with her is likely Clayton's son. After two weeks, he's able to track them down to a Wal-Mart parking lot in Traverse City.

In the first of several touches I really liked, Beukes gives each chapter a title. Bambi. Last Night a DJ Saved My Life. The Detective's Daughter. The choice of Detroit as a setting feels unique and Beukes wisely channels the local antipathy for hip outsiders drawn by a desire for "ruin porn" or rumination of the failed America into a New Yorker who shows up and falls for all those cliches initially.

The story unfolds like a police procedural, with an emphasis on character. Gabi takes lead investigator on that bizarre homicide her team code names "Faline," after Bambi's girlfriend. Gabi's colleagues are sharply drawn in a way that indicates Beukes spent more time around real cops than movie cops. The choices reminded me a lot of Red Dragon by Thomas Harris, with Beukes just as interested if not more interested in the lives of her characters outside their relationship with the serial killer.

Beukes seems to know serial killers frontwards and backwards and can write killer descriptions too, screenwriter's descriptions. These propel the story forward at all times and made it come alive in my imagination:

Luke Stricker looks even more brutish since he shaved his head, the kind of guy you would expect to be on the other side of the handcuffs. It complicates matters having him on this, but he's one of the most competent cops on the force. And competence is very attractive. Especially now.

Beukes is able to jump into different characters with quite a bit of skill. A detective and single mom. A petulant teenager who can't live without her phone. A homeless ex-con. A male artist losing his grip on reality. A writer looking to reinvent himself.

The serial killer stuff is okay, not on the level of Hannibal Lecter, but I didn't mind because the characters were so well defined and I was invested in them. Beukes finds an ingenious way to crash her detective, detective's daughter, tabloid journalist, homeless ex-con and artist into each other. I was on my way to becoming a fan of this author, signing up for her mailing list and everything.

And then ... Jesus, Mary and Joseph and the donkey they rode in on. In the last sixty pages, Beukes completely switches gears, starts writing a different novel and the chain flies off the bike. I've yet to encounter a climax that fails as monumentally as the one in this book does. Handling the Undead by John Ajvide Lindqvist comes to mind, but that unraveled into an incoherent mess early, at 60 pages. Here, Beukes aced 374 pages before collapsing. I will reveal why for the curious:

The police procedural turns into (view spoiler)[a rejected spec for The X-Files, with the serial killer transcending space and time to lure the characters into waking nightmares, like Solaris on LSD. The killer, for reasons unexplained, seems to have been possessed by some entity or force that gives him supernatural powers, like making crows burst through the body of Jonno's girlfriend. (hide spoiler)]

This switch in gears is completely unannounced. There are no seances, no indication that the serial killer we're dealing with is Doctor Strange. No doors are opened into the world of the unexplained. Beukes grounds the story in reality but like her killer, splices something foreign onto the hind quarters.

I'm at a loss to explain how this book was allowed to go to galleys with the ending that it has. The Shining Girls dealt with magical realism, so perhaps there was pressure to couch the follow-up in the same sub-genre.

This novel deserves a recall. Pull it from shelves and rewrite the last 60 pages in a sane manner, please, one that honors and respects the characters and the world the author built. I'll revise my rating accordingly. Until then, I have to slap this book with the lowest rating I can for one I finished. What a major disappointment.