This was a fever dream of a book!

This will be quite a short review as I'm.not sure what to say about it - I don't know if I liked it or no.
The author creates a world (his own?) in which he is shuttered in a cabin, wrestling with writers block. The text is letters to an editor, and also musings of his own. But the solitude and perhaps the authors own slow creeping madness turn the words into a heady mix of images that I'm never quite sure what is real and what is not.
Is he suffering from isolation madness? Is the gas leaking out of his cooking canister and making him hallucinate? Is he just mad? Or has the ghost of Mary Shelley really come to entreat him to reimagine her most famous work?

I'm still unsure. And I kinda hate that about books! I like definite answers and endings, so it was annoying to read such ambiguities. However, the lurid, often hallucinatory prose was gripping.

Jury is out in this one. I'd say go for it. Its certainly interesting, as a literary exercise.

I found this novella, while having an interesting premise, failed to live up to my expectations.

I expected some form of intrigue and self discovery. Instead I felt underwhelmed with the narrator seeming to reflect upon themselves in a fashion which was unappealing and bland.

A very short tale, this should have taken me less than an hour to complete. Instead it took me 3 sessions over 4 days to complete it.

While not a complete failure, I doubt I would have picked this up had I known just how flat and colourless the story was.

I've read a few books by Marcus Sedgwick and they're almost all exceptionally odd, so this one didn't take me too much by surprise -- I was expecting beautiful prose and a narrative that tied my brain in knots and that's more or less what I got.

The prose is, indeed, beautiful, in a self-inserty kind of way that probably appeals particularly to writers. The narrator is a writer (implied to be Sedgwick himself due to use of initials) who has retreated to a house in the Alps to write a book which seems to be a condemnation of Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN, which he claims to hate. His struggles to write are lovingly described in the terms of someone who has clearly felt that same creative block in the past -- it's both relatable and lovely, at least in terms of prose.

The story, however, is decidedly unlovely (in a good way) (I think). It becomes increasingly threatening as this writer begins to hear breathing, finds objects moved around the house, lose track of time... at first subtly, and then growing more obvious until he finds himself physically prevented from trying to leave.

Then he's visited by the ghost of Mary Shelley, and things get stranger from there.

The book leaves a lot up to your imagination. Is it really a ghost story? Is the writer suffering from a mental breakdown, or being poisoned by leaky gas? (Mentioned near the beginning is a dodgy gas pipe, and a smell 'like gas' is repeatedly referenced throughout the story, which might explain the hallucinations and loss of time.) It's unsettling, and Sedgwick does a remarkable job of conveying incoherent thoughts without the prose becoming clunky or unreadable.

My main complaint would be that the book is a little bit too self-referential. Or... perhaps that's not the right term. But I mentioned already that the writer is implied to be Sedgwick himself, and maybe that's while it feels a little cheesy. It's hard to explain the exact moments that bothered me without giving spoilers, to be honest, but I'd been enjoying it thoroughly up until that conversation and then it began to lose me.

I'm trying to think of comparative titles and I guess I might reference the ending of I AM THE MESSENGER by Markus Zusak (is it a Marcus thing?), but this was definitely less frustrating than that, because there was less buildup and it felt less like a plot-related copout. I suppose I'm just particularly sensitive to things that feel like a self insert fic where the writer is exploring a weird daydream-turned-nightmare.

The prose and style is definitely a strength, though, and the ultimate message -- that you can't control your own creations, but that you're responsible for how they're interpreted and what they're used to achieve -- is a powerful one.
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This review appears on Goodreads and will be cross-posted to my blog.

My thanks to NetGalley and Head of Zeus for a review copy of this one.

This is a very strange little book. I put in a request for it because essentially of the themes that the description said it dealt with, of Mary Shelley, and Frankenstein; of the thought processes that go into imagination, into creation, into reading and writing. And it certainly is about that, but just not in a way I’d expected or imagined. Our author or at least an author (still not sure whether this is meant to be the author himself or a creation through which he is speaking) is up in the mountains, close to the location of the Villa Diodati, where Mary Shelley at age nineteen first came up with her most famous novel Frankenstein, pondering over the book, which he claims he hates for various reasons, its elitism and “racism” among them. But alongside he also engages with various other questions that trouble him, the isolated environment in which he is which is beginning to get to him, the writer’s block that he seems to be suffering, his own work, which has been writing horror stories, which come back to haunt him. We see and experience what the author does, in a sense like a stream of consciousness style. Occasionally we hear another voice, the voice of another person I mean (you will see who I mean when you read the book) but that too is as the author has seen and heard it.

This was a very different book from anything I’ve read before, and honestly even after finishing, this is a book hard to classify (it isn’t a story yet it is, it isn’t a literary essay, yet it is, and more such confusions) or even rate for me, in fact I’m not entirely sure what to make of it, even though I am trying to put down my thoughts. Both the Frankenstein and Mary Shelley theme, and that of authors and their creations (especially in the “horror” category) are explored alongside, the latter in some ways springing from the former and yet separate. The author claims to dislike the book, to hate it, offers some literary criticism, but then also takes us through what is admirable about it. The story (which I’m sure everyone knows) of how and where Frankenstein was created is mentioned, but while the blurb led me to expect that there would be a lot more focus on that aspect, this wasn’t really so. His criticisms of the book were points that hadn’t really occurred to me—so they were interesting to explore, and its message as our author identifies it was something that did stand out on my reading too so that I agreed with. Again the exploration of author and creation, how much of a creation is the author’s and how much it takes on a life of its own, and even touches the author, I found interesting to think about. The author/narrator’s own work coming back to haunt him in different ways was perhaps the fictional part of the story, but whether the atmosphere of the place, the isolation is a mere trigger to all of the rest that’s happening or represents something more is one point that I haven’t been able to figure out. The link between the Mary Shelley–Frankenstein issue, and the author–creation question made sense, as also did the question of why our author’s creations were perhaps haunting him (that there was more reason than one), but the ending was something I couldn’t entirely make sense of. I see some points that the book is trying to make (I think) but not I think entirely what it tries to say at the end—the ‘conclusion’ as it were.

The artwork between the sections was interesting—some of this made sense, the other parts didn’t (was it meant not to? Was it meant to represent the confusion?)—in the ARC version, part of it wasn’t very clear either.

But anyway, how do I rate it? I guess mid-way-3 stars. I can’t say I loved the book, not did I completely dislike it. It made me think of some things, some things made sense, and yet not all of it.

This is an interesting book in that it not only re imagines one of the greatest literary works of all time but also acts as a criticism to said book.
Its an interesting concept and works for a short story.
Solid 3.5*s from me.

The Monsters We Deserve is an act of literary criticism wrapped up as a short gothic horror novel, in which an author staying in the Alps and obsessed with his dislike of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein starts to question the line between creator and monster. It is written in a distinctive, immediate style, trying to capture a sense of the unnerving remote location and the lingering ghosts of author and character. Indeed, the atmosphere is one of its strengths, as the combination of spooky and experimental gives it a frenzied edge, making it difficult to tell what, in the context of the narrative, is real or imagined.

It is the literary criticism part that confuses it. The narrator's hatred for Frankenstein feels at odds with the fact that the novel is likely to appeal to people with an interest in Shelley's book, no matter how much of a plot device it is. There is also something about the way the narrator (who is framed as Sedgwick himself) directs a lot of his hatred onto Mary Shelley and her failings (to go too far into the weird dynamic here would be to give spoilers, though). Most people would be likely to agree with the importance of creation and responsibility in Frankenstein that the narrator must strive to prove is the 'meaning' of it, though this is at least partly framed as unaccepted.

For a book about creation and imagination, it seems very willing to give definitive views on both the novel and the historical writers it talks about. The manner in which in the novel literary criticism becomes a definite act and one centred around authorial intention must be interpreted through the lens of the metafictional elements of the book in order to see beyond the narrator's opinionated stance. Indeed, it can feel like arguing with the narrator is the only way to engage with the idea of authors creating monsters they cannot control.

As an eerie short novel with a metafictional side, The Monsters We Deserve does pretty well. There is a lot left unsaid in between the lines, which matches up with the narrator's reluctance to tell the full truth about his previous horror writing and with the mysterious and unexplained elements in the narrative. However, as a novel engaging with Frankenstein, it is disappointing.

Well...first I disliked it, then it was vital to finish it, all the while waiting for the monster to pounce. A bit like the central character really. A book about a book, but not just any old book - Mary Shelley's gothic horror and the monster she - or Frankenstein? created. Or did the monster create itself from fertile imaginations in the minds of writers and readers? This is what an author debates as his own horror tales haunt him, as he imagines Mary's tale haunted her.
There are far more questions raised than answered, but as a tribute to the greatest horror story, this is a short, and certainly not sweet, but very compelling read. How much of it is biographical? I suspect Marcus Sedgwick won't want to let on and thus creates his own horror mystery.

The Monsters We Deserve certainly offers something different. I can't say what I was expecting, but I can confirm what I got caught me by surprise. At first I found that a tad jarring; however, I was soon sucked in to both story and concept, so my initial reaction no longer matter. The Monsters We Deserve is an intriguing idea, and it offers some interesting thoughts on the nature of creation and how characters can take on lives of their own, independent of the author's original intent, fuelled by the imaginations of the story's readers. The link with Frankenstein worked well for the most part, and I enjoyed the author's thoughts on that book, and how they connected to his own ideas, gradually changing alongside his experiences in the cabin. I didn't find the conclusion of the piece completely satisfying, and the use of incorrect punctuation here and there made me frown. Nonetheless, this was a thought-provoking and original work, and for that I commend the author.