01/16/2023
A monster takes the place of a dead child in Mexican writer Sámano Córdova’s sly and unsettling debut. Santiago, 11, dies from an unspecified illness while convalescing in Upstate New York. “Her son was alive, and now he isn’t. How dull,” the author writes of Magos, the mother, who feels robbed of a sense of drama: she’d previously imagined Santiago dying in her arms in a crowded mall as she became “a Pietá.” She keeps a piece of his lung in a jar as a memento mori, and when they return to Mexico City, the family’s housekeeper tells Magos a story about a woman who kept and fed a young child’s heart and another child grew in its place. Magos then spoons some broth into the jar, and by the following morning, the lung has begun growing. Magos keeps feeding the lung until it breaks out of the jar, then bites off part of her thumb. Eventually, the lung grows to be the size of a child, and Magos names him Monstrilio. Her husband gets Monstrilio a cat tower for him to perch on, though their creation proves less domesticated than they’d hoped. While the prose is a bit flat, Sámano Córdova does a good job elucidating the contours of grief and love. This creepy work of psychological horror gives readers plenty to chew on. (Mar.)
An extraordinary act of imagination, an extended meditation that begins in grief, family, belonging, and moves past that, into a deeper discovery of the power of love—and the powerlessness of love, as well its strangeness. With Monstrilio, Sámano Córdova makes a remarkable, kaleidoscopic debut.” —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
“Simply exquisite. Easily one of my favorite reads this year.” —Sarah Gailey, bestselling author of Just Like Home and The Echo Wife
“Gerardo Sámano Córdova’s dark, soulful magic puts me in mind of Kelly Link or Carmen Maria Machado (and further back, Mary Shelley). The horror of grief has rarely been so viscerally or movingly evoked.” —Peter Ho Davies, author of A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself
“Haunting and often bleakly humorous, Gerardo Sámano Córdova’s Monstrilio is a captivating tone poem of trauma, grief, and transformation. Córdova writes with the lyrical precision of a master surrealist and creates an uncompromising vision of literary horror that is so wholly unique and utterly his own.” —Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke and Other Misfortunes
“In Gerardo Sámano Córdova’s spare, soulful, and singular Monstrilio, a mother’s grief turns monstrous, literally taking on a life of its own. As tender and terrifying as its titular character, Monstrilio is just as likely to work its way into your heart as into your nightmares. Prepare to unhinge your jaw and devour it whole.” —Maria Adelmann, author of Girls of a Certain Age and How to be Eaten
“Monstrilio is the monster story about grief I've been craving. Bloody and full of longing, it gets under your skin and doesn’t let you go. A thrilling and heartbreaking ride from Mexico City to NYC to Berlin, brilliantly capturing what it means to lose someone you love with ferocious tenderness. Gerardo Sámano Córdova is an international revelation and one of the boldest new voices writing today.” —Akil Kumarasamy, author of Meet Us by the Roaring Sea and Half Gods
“Monstrilio is unlike any other book I’ve read. Genuinely scary at times, it moved me with its humanity, made me laugh, and ultimately, made me cry. Gerardo Sámano Córdova has written a stunning exploration of grief, belonging, and familial love in prose so beautiful you won’t want to rush through it—even as you need to know what happens next.” —Ana Reyes, author of The House in the Pines
02/01/2023
DEBUT The novel opens just moments after a young couple has lost their only son Santiago, his small body folded between them in his tiny bed. In an act of grief or love or desperation, Magos, the boy's mother, carves out a piece of his lung, places it in a jar, and begins to feed it. This being a horror novel, of course, this doesn't go well, and eventually the hungers and desires and thingness of what results must be reckoned with. How Magos and her husband Joseph reckon with monstrilio provides the emotional thrust of the story, which is told from four perspectives across the urban landscapes of Brooklyn, Berlin, and Mexico City. Córdova asks the reader to consider the limits of familial love and understanding. He provides no easy answers, and readers may find themselves touched and horrified in equal measure. VERDICT An enthralling debut that packs a heavy emotional punch. Fans of domestic horror like Zoje Stage's Baby Teeth or Ashley Audrain's The Push will find a lot to chew on here.—Colin Chappell
2022-12-24
A mother despondent over the death of her son employs a bloody dose of magical realism to bring him back to life.
In this wicked debut novel, Sámano Córdova combines queer themes touching on identity, kink, and consent with Latin American mysticism for an unusually visceral coming-of-age tale. In New York, an 11-year-old Mexican boy named Santiago dies, leaving his mother, Magos, and father, Joseph, in terrible grief. Magos defiantly carves a piece of her son’s lung from his body, returning with it to Mexico City. As in a folktale, Magos’ guardianship of her bloody talisman breathes new life into it, resulting in a hungry rat-thing that eventually grows into a doppelgänger for her son she names Monstrilio, or M, complete with fangs, claws, fur, and a mysterious vestigial limb. It’s a true grotesquerie on the surface, although the body horrors and violent trespasses to come are primarily springboards to explore the inner lives of these characters—Magos; her best friend, Lena; Joseph; and finally young and ravenous M himself—and their transformations in the face of love and loss. Magos, resolutely determined to keep her monster alive, is enabled by Lena, one of Mexico’s youngest surgeons, whose emotional blinders, medical ethics, and rationalizations blind her to M’s true nature. Back in New York two years after his divorce, Joseph has found love with Peter, a financial analyst who believes M is merely Joe’s son from an earlier marriage. As Joseph and Peter plan their wedding and Magos throws herself into a career as a celebrated performance artist, M is growing into a young man, complete with not only the turmoil and tension that coming-of-age brings, but a growing realization about his own ferocious, ravenous nature. As his sexual conquests and appetite evolve, self-realization turns to self-fulfillment. Deciding who to root for in this Kafkaesque myth may prove perplexing for readers, but there’s no doubt there’s nothing quite like it.
A Promethean fable about reconstruction, reinvention, and the occasional human-sized snack.
