Reviews

“Part harrowing thriller, part urban-Grimm’s fairytale, but always filled with a deeply affecting humanity, Broken Monsters is the kind of book you’ll find yourself pressing into the hands of everyone you know so they can experience it too.”  – Megan Abbott, author of The Fever and Dare Me

“Broken Monsters is a show-stopping story of a city trying to rise from its own ashes, its inhabitants struggling with their own demons, and monster working to shape the world to match his most disturbing visions. It’s beautiful, horrifying, thrilling, and most impressive of all, possessed of a deep and remarkable compassion. I wish I’d written it.” – Ivy Pochoda, author of Visitation Street

“Dig it:  what a brilliant crime-phantasmagoria novel this is!!!!!  This splendid novel is THE new primer on urban decay to the nth degree.  I unhesitatingly urge you to buy it and read it now!!!” – James Ellroy

“Beukes is a novelist of unflinchingly keen eye and ambitious ideas. Her love of the cityscape is palpable in her work, and her social commentary biting… This is no Red Dragon – this is something more sinister and beautiful than that.” – Zoe Hinis, The Book Armada

“What Beukes is doing here is using the conventions of the cop novel (gruesome crime, meddling journalist, tough homicide cop with vulnerable child) to do something incredibly clever and incredibly interesting. The plot is slippery and strange, and the tension and the weirdness build and build, to a climax like nothing you’ve ever read—not in crime fiction, not in literary fiction, not anywhere.” – Ben H. Winters, author of The Last Policeman

“If there was ever a perfectly crafted ode to a fallen American city, this is it. She tackles the Motor City with the authentic finesse of The Wire by way of Red Dragon, polished with sublime sheen of noir-cool.” – Michael Patrick Hicks, author of Convergence.

“Captivating…Broken Monsters defies the standard tropes of the serial killer genre to become a thoroughly modern supernatural thriller….Beukes plays with genre in a slippery but propulsive way, fusing together fantasy, crime fiction and a hint of social critique.”  — Los Angeles Times

“Lauren Beukes’s ‘The Shining Girls’ was, hands down, one the scariest reads of 2013; even fearmeister extraordinaire Stephen King thought so. With ‘Broken Monsters,’ Beukes shows she wasn’t just messing around….Beukes is as enamored of words and wordplay as she is of an adventurous story line. Like a mixed-media art installation, Beukes’s novel takes on multiple aspects, whisking you on a roller-coaster ride — in the dark, Sensurround sound turned up to 11 — that barrels as seamlessly through the minefield-riddled mind of a killer as it does through the colorful, chaotic, elaborately-image-papered bedroom of a teen.” — Boston Globe

“Beukes is brilliant with plot and character….This is a novel that will take you to some dark places — philosophically and narratively — but it also has the guts to suggest that hope is not lost. We can find our way out of the thicket of lies and cruelty, even if we make a lot of ugly mistakes along the way.”   — iO9

“It falls to the author, then, to pull something fresh from all that well-trod offal…Beukes managed it masterfully in last year’s time-traveling best-seller THE SHINING GIRLS, and she does it again in MONSTERS, fleshing out stock characters…and imbuing her story with shrewd social commentary, dark humor, and a dusting of metaphysical wonder.” — Entertainment Weekly

“Beukes takes the reader on a remarkable tour of Motor City in all its devastated grandeur. Along the way, we glimpse the complexity, resilience and hope of its people, even in the midst of mounting dread inspired by events both natural and supernatural.” — Chicago Tribune

“This is proper horror, with the requisite amount of killings, and this is proper crime, with clues and red herrings and scumbag journalists trying to get rich on YouTube. The fact that both exist in the same novel doesn’t make it a mash up. It makes it a fresh, super-fun read.” — LitReactor

“The anticipation and dread Beukes creates is remarkable.  Also remarkable is Beukes’s ability to blend genres….It feels new – unprecedented, in a way….She provides rich, layered commentary on the desolation of dreams with her decaying Detroit setting.  It’s about the pressure of mass desire.  About how to reassemble broken pieces.”  — Entertainment Weekly’s “Shelf Life”

“It might be hard to take a break from Broken Monsters and do all those necessary life tasks (like brushing your teeth and going to work). You might just want to take a sick day and read this one in one fell swoop.” — Bustle

“Beukes is…the most adventurous stylist among these writers, dotting her potboiler plot with Joycean streams of consciousness and transcripts from ripped from Internet comments threads.” — Laura Miller, Salon

“Lauren Beukes so seamlessly blends two genres that it’s hard to pinpoint the moment a commonplace crime story because infested with supernatural horror.”  — Daily News (New York)

“Beukes is a genre-busting South African novelist with a sharp prose style who has a good handle on America.” — Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

“When Stephen King calls a book ‘scary as hell and hypnotic,’ don’t’ read it late at night in a tent in the woods….” — The Wall Street Journal

“Lauren Beukes is a marvel. Broken Monsters is a brilliant genre-defying thriller that breathes humanity and compassion for its rich, complex characters even as it gives you a hair-raising, nail-biting ride through gritty inner-city Detroit. A must-read.” – Alice LaPlante, author of Turn of Mind

“Seamlessly fuses the unbridled ingenuity of Stephen King with the master craftsmanship of Michael Connelly’s police procedurals. Broken Monsters is an unabashedly contemporary thriller, fresh in its approach and narrated with the stylish prose we’ve come to expect from Beukes.” – Simon McDonald

“This is one of the most breathtakingly original thriller-fantasy novels in years, not least because Beukes uses the genre as it should be used: to bring into focus the horror of reality; to make the truth plain. Corrupted dreams that infect us and make us monstrous – the stuff of Shakespeare and Bronte, Dickens and Wilde and Miller. And now, Lauren Beukes too. Beukes is fast becoming the master of the modern fairy-tale ” – Beyers de Vos, EQ View

‘Like watching a fireworks display. Her sentences pop, fizz and explode across the page; leaving you oohing and ahhing with your mouth open.’ – Michael Robotham, author of Watching You

“Beukes’s writing style is really gripping and fantastic…” — Carolyn Kellogg

“Following The Shining Girls (2013), Beukes returns with another genre-bender boasting sympathetic characters, meticulously rendered settings, an unflinchingly realistic crime scene, and a distinctly horror-fiction atmosphere….Beukes avoids predictability by leading readers to doubt their interpretations of motives and events, blending detection and atmospheric horror to court both hard-boiled mystery and literary-horror fans. Think Peter Straub meets Karin Slaughter.” —Booklist (STARRED review)

“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…Beukes gave us a time traveling serial killer in The Shining Girls, and the monsters in her latest tale, whether they’re real or imagined, will keep you up all night.” — Kirkus Reviews (STARRED)

“In this highly atmospheric novel, Beukes sketches a metropolis full of hope and vigor, in spite of a monster roaming its streets. A powerful look at our fascination with social media and the transformative power of art and imagination round out this genre-defying chiller’s captivating and terrifying narrative.” — Library Journal (STARRED)