Review: I Am the Monster Under the Bed by Emily Zinnikas

                                                      

Print Length: 320 pages

Publisher: St.Martin's Press (September 15, 2024)

From Goodreads.com: Something lives under Willa’s bed. As an adult, her fondest childhood memories are of the invisible entity under her bed who taught her how to read. Now thirty-two, Willa is a reclusive but successful painter until a bombshell news report exposes her identity as the controversial survivor of the unsolved Rapture Mystery Slayings, a small-town tragedy that splashed across headlines during her senior year of high school. Six teenagers died in the woods while Willa walked free, and everyone thinks she killed them.

When an old classmate calls about a funeral, Willa reluctantly travels to her sleepy hometown, where the possessed forest that stole her friends looms. The trees whistle for her attention, but she knows better than to listen. And the unexplained knocking from the shadows in the basement of her decaying childhood home is honestly the least of her problems.

As her past pulls her back to the place she swore she’d never return, Willa is drawn toward the monster she left behind—and becoming the villain her hometown has always believed her to be.

  

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My Rating: 2 stars out of 5

This was a book with a lot of genuinely interesting ideas, which makes it all the more frustrating that it tried to do absolutely everything at once and somehow managed to accomplish almost nothing. There were pieces here that worked beautifully; the eerie atmosphere, the hints of something unnatural lurking just out of sight, the sense that the town itself was rotten in a way that most people seemed to know about, but no one wanted to acknowledge. But then, the more I read? The more it all fell apart.

First let's take a look at the characters shall we? Not only are the vast majority of them absolutely unlikeable, but Willa was the kind of character that drives me absolutely insane. Seriously, where did this woman's backbone go?

When we first meet Willa, she's perfectly capable of standing up for herself and putting someone in their place. Then she returns to her hometown and apparently leaves that backbone somewhere in Pennsylvania because suddenly she allows just about everyone in town to blame her for what happened when she was a teenager. They berate her, they throw stones at her (literally), and with one notable exception, she just...takes it. And not only does she take it, but she stubbornly refuses to leave town, acting like she couldn't have painted the memorial painting from her house in Pennsylvania. Heck, she could have even had ger old family home fixed up after she went back home to Pennsylvania (although that also begs the question why hadn't she done so prior to now)?No, she stayed partly because she felt the overwhelming need to spy on the man who hurt her in the past despite having absolutely no evidence that he was doing anything wrong now. Because of course, that logic makes complete sense. 

And then there is the matter of Willa’s highly selective skepticism. She seems fully prepared to believe that a "monster" lived under her bed, that there were people-shaped entities in her basement, and something ominous lived in the woods that she had to feed raw meat to, but ghosts? Apparently that is where she draws the line. Seriously? I am still not entirely sure what the author was trying to do with that. The supernatural elements were actually some of the strongest parts of the book, and if the novel had committed to that eerie, unsettling direction, I probably would have enjoyed it much more.

***SPOILER ALERT*** 

***SERIOUSLY QUICKY SCROLL BY IF YOU DON'T WANT SPOILERS***

Instead, the ending veered into a “monsters good, men bad” narrative that completely killed my interest. Yes, terrible people exist in the world, across all genders, and yes, human cruelty can be more horrifying than anything supernatural I get that, but the way this theme was handled here was just... ugh. How are you going to spend the entire book setting up these genuinely creepy supernatural possibilities only to hit the reader with the line, "Not a monster. A man. Of course it was, it was always a man," 

I'm sorry...what? You spent all this time making the reader wonder what the heck was actually happening, only to essentially pull the curtain back and say, "Never mind! Men are the real monsters!"

No. I wanted the monsters you promised me this entire time. Or at least for the killer to actually make sense. 

***END SPOILERS*

For a debut novel, though, I do think there is potential here. The author clearly has some interesting ideas, and the supernatural elements in particular were well done. My biggest piece of advice for the next book would be to pick one of those ideas and run with it. Give me the creepy supernatural story you clearly have hiding in there instead of trying to cram five different stories into one book.

DISCLAIMER: I received a complimentary copy of this novel from the publisher. This has not affected my review in any way. All thoughts and opinions expressed in this review are 100% my own.