I just finished Mr Monster by Dan Wells. This post will show some thoughts about the book.

Since Dan retweeted the message I sent yesterday about how I liked the book, I feel like I have to be extra-careful in this review.

Foreword about the author

First, I’ll tell you about Dan. Since I didn’t post reviews at the time I read his first book “I’m not a serial killer”, I never got to talk about him.

I know Dan Wells because of Writing Excuses. I stumbled on this postcast one year ago, and you can thank these 3 guys for pushing me onto the writing path. At the time, I only knew about Brandon Sanderson because of wheel of time (I think I had started to read his “Mistborn” series at about that time), but I had never heard of the two other guys. In the podcast, you hear Brandon (often leading the cast), and Howard (with his humor). Dan is usually quieter than the two others, but from time to time, he gets out some witty phrase that always cracks me up. Over the episodes, I’ve grown to appreciate his viewpoint maybe because of the 3, he’s the one I’m most like (even if he’s somewhat more versed in poetry and stuff I don’t like that much).

Well, when Dan writes, it’s almost the same as when he does a podcast : you have quiet, yet gripping writing, and from time to time, some flash of humor will unhorse you. And there is the fact that he’s mostly a discovery writer like me, so I love to see his work (his latest blog entries relating his writing of a short story are a gold mine!).

Now, to the book

This is the second installment in a series that wasn’t supposed to be a series.

The character is John Cleaver, a teenager sociopath, whose entire life revolves about not succumbing to his dark side. In the last book, John had to fight a demon, and the book ended with the protagonist killing the monster. As we only knew of one monster, the story could have stopped here. But, as editors often do, they asked for more, and Dan had to go back to work and produce more “serial killer” books. At first, I thought that he would have trouble picking up a finished story and finding new things to interest us. Maybe Dan did have trouble, I don’t know, but he still managed to grab my interest and not to let it go.

So why did it work?

The character first : the teenager sociopath is really something. I feel like I really understand it – euh, him (scary thing to understand a sociopath – maybe I should have my head checked). In a sense, John Cleaver is very much like Bean (from Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s game), but with more internal turmoil. We get to see inside a smart kid’s head, experience his emotions (or lack of) as a teenager (loved the “Dates” scenes), plus see him struggle with his internal demon. I loved the way we are given to understand which persona is in charge of John at a given time : that was neat.

Now, the plot : this is a short novel (well, short for someone who reads fantasy doorstops like me). We have quite some pages of setup before the plot really kicks in. I was a little led off by the fact that John assumed that the new killer was using the places of the last killer : when they went to the lake, how did the new killer know that there had been a killing there? Well, turns out I trusted John’s belief at that time, which turned out to be slightly wrong. This had me a little annoyed at the time to fall for the “unreliable narrator”-trick. For the rest of the plot, it goes on increasingly well until the climax. The first book had only horror components in the killing scenes, but in this one, you get your goose bumps at the end, in the killer’s house. These scenes were much more powerful (horror-wise) than those in the last book, so great job there, Dan!

What made this book even more satisfying was of course the ending – the 2 last pages. You have “surprising, yet inevitable” character-based components here. As much as I was pained by some of those events, I understood that they had been coming, so I was sad, yet satisfied. I think all the book leads to those last 2 pages : the gruesome events of the climax serve only here as background for what’s to come.

Recap

So, to recap it all, great job Dan. You managed to take a story where I didn’t see how you could produce a sequel, and not only gave me a brilliant sequel, but managed to make me want to read the third book right now.

Dan : wouldn’t you happen to have a very-very-advanced reader copy on hand?