Gerardo Sámano Córdova

I love these types of books -- heartfelt, a mixbag of a bunch of things. Meanings that could be a bunch of things. Not so much horror as horrifying. A book that will live in my brain, more and more as time expands. Weird and gets weirder as the story expands. Who is the monster? What is monstrous? David Lynch's Eraserhead but focused on grief, combined with 'Chouette' by Claire Oshetsky (which I am now remembering has an Eraserhead epigraph, so there you go.) Plus, something else that haunts me at the edges of my mind, that I can't quite attach to a specific nightmare...
*Book #151/340 I have read of the shortlisted Morning News Tournament of Books… (mehr)

When her young son dies, a mother, overcome with sorrow, cuts open his body and takes a small segment of his lung. Placing it in a jar, she leaves her husband to return to Mexico City, where she feeds and nurtures the piece of lung until it eventually becomes something that isn't her son, or even human, but very much alive and with its own urges and tastes.

Monstrilio begins as a story about grief and how it can pull people together and drive them apart, and then it becomes something else. Structured into four segments, following the mother, her best friend, the husband and finally, Monstrilio itself, this is a story that goes in unanticipated directions as the human characters care for the strange creature, but struggle to find a balance between letting it live its life and forming it into something like the lost son. This is an odd and oddly compelling story despite the characters behaving in ways that no actual person ever would.… (mehr)