Lindsay Starck: Monsters We Have Made | Penguin Random House Books | Mar. 26
Lindsay Starck with Daniel Wallace | Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill | July 9, 5:30 p.m.
In Gravity and Grace, a posthumous collection of Simone Weil’s philosophical reflections, she observes, “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied. Real evil is gloomy, dull, and boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.” Is this still the case today? Or has the internet killed the romantic appeal of so-called evil monsters?
This question is posed in Lindsay Starck’s new novel, Monsters We Have Made. Starck, who is now based in Minnesota, graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill and is the author of Noah’s Wife.
The novel begins in 2008 with hikers calling 911 after finding a teenage babysitter stabbed by two nine-year-old girls in Durham’s Eno River State Park. This haunting incident serves as a portal, propelling readers into the intricate web of emotions between Sylvia and Jack, two soulmates turned estranged by their nine-year-old daughter Faye’s puzzling descent into violence.
The true villain in this story is the Kingman: a faceless figure who lures children into the forest toward his kingdom in the North Woods of Minnesota. He haunts, as Starck writes, “the dreams of parents flung across the country, the monster who emerged from the Fertile Crescent and stalked through shadows of the centuries, sliding through civilization after civilization, story after story, until he found us.”
In the present day, the Kingman—who is based on Slender Man and Susan Cooper’s “boggart”—can be found in numerous rabbit holes and chat forums. Following this Eno River State Park tragedy, more children attempt to murder adults who get in the way of their search for the Kingman.
The narrative airlifts in and out of the stabbing’s aftermath and a new development, 10 years later, when four-year-old Amelia is abandoned in a parked car in a Durham grocery store. Her parents are nowhere to be found, so the police take Amelia to her next of kin—Sylvia.
In literary telenovela fashion, Sylvia and Jack are reunited to take care of Amelia and locate their distant daughter, Faye, who is also Amelia’s mother. She is on a new quest to find the Kingman—again.
While this may sound borderline nightmarish, Monsters We Have Made is actually, somehow, a feel-good story. Even though the characters encounter difficult experiences in North Carolina, they also zoom around the state—from coast to mountains—in such a dreamy way. Sunny flashbacks among butterfly migrations and coppices reveal how sweet Sylvia’s and Jack’s lives were before the stabbing incident. Furthermore, Sylvia is a gentle bibliophile and hardcore romantic.
In the second half of Monsters We Have Made, the narrative begins to feel as if the author is withholding information about Sylvia when her loved ones—namely her Minnesota-based sister— abandon Sylvia during the hardest passage of her life following her daughter’s juvenile indictment, an abandonment that is portrayed as justified. Is there something other characters are seeing about Sylvia that is obfuscated from the reader? Then again, sometimes sisters just suck.
Starck’s deep love of language is evident: the characters choose their words carefully and etymological breakdowns are seamlessly woven into the narrative. The role of stories is explored through free-standing references to historical and literary snapshots depicting “vanishing children” throughout time. The investigation into what makes a monster scary is explored in equal measure to what makes love scary.
In fact, characters often choose to spend their time looking for a monster instead of rebuilding bonds with their loved ones.
The darkest territory of the book is the shifting landscape of online manipulation. Monsters We Have Made has hit the bookshelves within months of the US surgeon general’s call for warning labels on social media sites. Imaginary monsters may be romantic, but the online ones are a different story.
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