Is [the serial killer] insane or legitimately possessed? Beukes doesn’t answer this question fully until the well-executed final chapters of her thriller, but the journey there is exquisitely paced and impeccably controlled … The domestic emotional struggles of the crusading cop and her precocious daughter are as engrossing as the hunt for the killer. Beukes also commits to the other members of her ensemble cast with brisk, suspenseful chapters that crackle with authentic shifts in narrative voice … an enormously satisfying novel that employs the best attributes of multiple genres to dramatize big ideas about art, the Internet and urban decay.
As a horror and suspense novel, Broken Monsters is flawless — I haven't read a scarier, more tense book in years. But Beukes brings so much more to the table: There's a huge amount of bitter social satire here … Broken Monsters is very much a novel of the present. The city of Detroit is a major, tragic character in the novel — ‘Some people have ghost towns, we have a whole ghost city,’ as one local artist puts it … It's hard to overstate how ambitious Broken Monsters is, maybe because Beukes somehow manages to make it look easy. Her prose is unhindered, exuberant and something like addictive.
Lauren Beukes' captivating Broken Monsters defies the standard tropes of the serial killer genre to become a thoroughly modern, supernatural thriller set against the backdrop of a crumbling American city (Detroit) attempting to piece itself back together … The book's main characters are connected by nightmarish hallucinations, and while Beukes' supernatural touch is a refreshing addition to the crime fiction genre, the source of these phantasms is somewhat opaque and mildly frustrating, though beautifully drawn and full of doom … There is a tense push-pull between the inhabitants of Detroit and their gentrifying occupiers about who is allowed to create the narrative of city and who is the most reliable narrator of perceptions of the place.
The narrative switches between Detective Versado, her teenage daughter – who is engaged in a dangerous game of paedophile-baiting with her best friend from school – a washed-up online journalist looking for a scoop, scavengers of Detroit's derelicts and the murderer. The last of these, horrifically, is the most sympathetic of the characters … She genuinely conjures up horror in its purest, most sincere form. There is real grief when characters we have come to identify with are subjected to all the banality and monstrosity of evil, and a goose-flesh sensation as we realise how similar the evil's values are to our own beliefs in art, in opportunity, in wanting the world to be a better place.
Beukes isn’t interested in building up suspense leading to grand reveal of who the killer really is. Part of the horror here is knowing who it is, of feeling their madness firsthand … There is...a definite, defiant kink in the weave of this narrative that tells you it isn’t the average sort of psycho-killer thriller. Broken Monsters is also part police-procedural, the multi-POV narrative including that of Detective Gabi Versado, a smart, dedicated Detroit cop who thinks she’s seen everything until she discovers a horrific body that’s both a boy and a deer, somehow grafted grotesquely together … Beukes’ ability to be astutely, bang-on-target contemporary is astounding. It’s not just that she points out that modern life is strange, with our dependencies on the internet for all sorts of validation, but that she’s willing to explore so many facets of it so fast and so cleverly.
Lauren Beukes so seamlessly blends two genres that it’s hard to pinpoint the moment a commonplace crime story becomes infested with supernatural horror … What begins as a straightforward investigation of a not-so-routine murder fragments as Beukes threads her story through multiple perspectives including Versado’s 15-year-old daughter, Layla; a guy named TK who scavenges newly-abandoned buildings for salable goods; and Jonno, a failed journalist from New York cynically looking to exploit the broken city for his own gain … Each is a fascinating character study, but the most compelling is Clayton, the man committing the grotesque murders.
Set in present-day Detroit, Beukes’s novel of suspense successfully combines horror, detection, and a depressing examination of urban decay … Beukes puts a fresh, imaginative spin on the trope of the serial killer.
A genuinely unsettling—in all the best ways—blend of suspense and the supernatural makes this a serial-killer tale like you’ve never seen … While it’s obvious that the five storylines will eventually join together, Beukes never takes the easy route, letting each character develop organically … The monsters in her latest tale, whether they’re real or imagined, will keep you up all night.
