Book Review: The Boy Who Drew Monsters
/The Boy Who Drew Monsters
On the floor between Jack Peter's old toy box and the desk, a mousetrap had been baited with a chunk of hard cheese, its killing bar poised to snap. Nick squatted on his haunches to inspect, resisting the urge to spring the mechanism with a quick finger. "What's this for?"From the bed, Jack Peter did not look up from the picture. "My mother thinks we have a mouse.""Have you ever seen it?" Nick sat on the toy box, remembering when it held their childish treasures.Jack Peter bent closer to the drawing. "I've never seen it because it isn't a mouse."
As Jack Peter pours more and more of his unhealthy energies into his drawings, his parents begin to hear strange sounds around and inside the house, and his father one night has a vivid encounter with a pale, shambling man-like creature. It frays his nerves, causing him in one neat scene to snap at his son, "There are no monsters" - which provokes a chilling response:
The boy faced him, a baleful expression in his eyes. "Just look, Daddy. He's out there now."The green ocean filled the window frame in a band across its width, and above it only sky, thick with gray clouds stretching to the far horizon To see the shoreline, Time had to come closer and nearly press his nose against the pane, his breath leaving a fog on the glass. To the right, the rocks wandered in the sand, and directly below the window he could make out the bow of a small wooden boat stored beneath the house. To the left, the headlands rose gradually to the lighthouse, and he worked his gaze back from that landmark to the irregular granite. He would have surely missed the figure crouched in the ledges had he not been expecting to find something. Straining to get a better look in the dim light, he bumped his forehead against the glass He pushed ever so slightly, as if that slight pressure might burst the seam between the inner and outer worlds. The figure on the rocks moved, shifting in its crouch, and it cocked its head toward the house. Tim could not be sure, but it appeared to be a man, a figure that reminded him of the strange thing he had seen that night on the road. White as winter, the hair a clot of whirls, a mangy beard. A wild and lonesome thing.
The prose on display there is indicative of Donohue's strengths and weaknesses. The weaknesses are obvious, especially a tendency toward lazy turns of phrase like "ever so slightly" (these are sprinkled liberally throughout the book; there's hardly a ten-page stretch without "her beamish boy" or "porcelain skin" or the like); the strengths are a bit more subtle, such as the way the description mirrors the way Mr. Keenan's eyes take in the landscape and only eventually find the horror crouched in front of him.The Boy Who Drew Monsters is a fast and satisfying read that saves several of its best twists for its last pages. These twists aren't in themselves remarkably original (readers who treasure, for instance, Ursula LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven will recognize some of the rhetorical furniture here), but Donohue's narrative skills carry the whole thing forward with infectious conviction. It makes for a lean and memorable Halloween treat.