Huffington Post featured Broken Monsters as one of their 9 Books So Scary You’ll Be Tricked and Treated.
“Beukes gave us a time traveling serial killer inThe Shining Girls, and the monsters in her latest tale, whether they’re real or imagined, will keep you up all night.”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.”
Here’s a snip:
“It specifically foregrounds the importance of the home, especially the ancestral home, the home with a certain amount of history to it,” says horror author and English professorJohn Langan. “Which does seem to have become one of the requirements for a haunted house setting.”
Later books and films have largely followed that lead, featuring houses whose dark histories are replete with slaughtered children and desecrated burial grounds. The idea that locations resonate with their collected history is one that appeals to South African author Lauren Beukes. Her new novel Broken Monsters is set amidst the blighted urban landscape of modern-day Detroit.
“You step into these places and there’s a vacancy,” she says. “And it’s what you bring to that vacancy—whether it’s your own baggage and malaise and malevolence and psychology, or whether there’s something there waiting to feed into it, is what makes it so interesting. And that dynamic of what rushes in to fill the vacuum is really the haunting.”