Reviewing Monstrilio | By Ong Wan Yi
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| Illustration by @kyliee.y |
There’s something about tragedies that make them wistfully haunting, and so much more terrifying than the average horror. Perhaps it’s the complexity that comes with the changed person; a person who grieves mindlessly starts to grow around the sorrow that takes root in their guts. And when the sorrow blooms, you find that they’ve become someone entirely different.
Settling on various characters’ accounts, ‘Monstrilio’ pushes a raw and almost vulgar narrative of grief and a clumsy search for identity in full display.
The Mother, Father, and Lung
The book begins with the death of 11-year-old Santiago. Seeking to be closer to him past skin-to-skin, Magos—his mother—cuts out a piece of his only lung in the quiet of the night. His father, Joseph grieves differently in a more visibly distraught manner, with messy hair and pitiful listlessness. Magos leaves Joseph and returns to Mexico with Santiago’s lung, where she learns of a local folktale: a heart that, once fed, became a man.
So, she feeds the lung and names it Monstrilio… and it grows, sentient and more aware than anybody expects it to be.
Grief and the Changed Person: Magos and Joseph
We tend to talk about grief as an emotion that will wash over us like a wave—sometimes the wave lasts longer, but it eventually goes. However, ‘Monstrilio’ depicts grief as the ‘Changed Person’: take Magos and Joseph. After the death of Santiago, their relationship crumbles almost instantaneously as the both of them are warped (or rather, transformed) by different versions of grief.
Throughout most of the book, Magos seems to not know where to put her feelings. She performs the person she was before her son died, to herself and to others. She finds Joseph less interesting, as Joseph loses himself in his grief. He falls apart like a stack of cards and wonders why Magos doesn’t grieve.
Yet, we see Magos’ grief very clearly in her thoughts and actions. No rational person would stick her hands into her dead son’s chest and carry a piece of his lung with her to feel closer to him, except a grieving mother. No rational person would feed a lung chicken broth because of a folktale with an organ-turned-human creature, except a grieving mother. And that was exactly who Magos was, a mother drowning in her grief. And ironically enough, her grief seemingly became a lung for her, thumping in survival mode like it did for her son.
Towards halfway through the book, in Berlin, Magos could hardly face the truth as Monstrilio grew into a human-looking teen—one that she imagined Santiago would’ve looked like. So, she starts calling him ‘Santiago’.
On the contrary, Joseph differentiated Monstrilio and Santiago almost clearly enough and called the no-longer Monstrilio by ‘M’. After the divorce with Magos, Joseph had moved back to New York and eventually welcomed a new partner in his life, Peter. He notes that with Peter, marriage didn’t feel as heavy as it did with Magos. He reflects on his relationship with Magos, and it seemed rooted in being the cocoon for her confident self. Joseph liked Magos’ confidence as much as he liked the way she showed her vulnerability only to him, and with Magos and Santiago, it made him feel grander than he ever believed himself to be.
Without Santiago, one could say that it broke his worldview—his married life with Magos had felt like a ‘forever’ thing, after all, and losing someone who supposedly completed that ‘forever’ threw a dissonant wrench in the equation.
Ultimately, this grief became a central experience in both of their lives, and as they grew around it and added more fragments to themselves, their past selves became more minuscule with each day till recognition turned impossible. Sitting heavy like a mast above the deck of a ship, perhaps this grief means Magos and Joseph are no longer who they once knew each other to be.
M the Statue, Monstrilio the Incomplete, and Santiago the Clay
“M kept rubbing the stump on his left hip, the remains of his arm-tail. Magos kept caressing a body that was not there.”
After the lung of Santiago—which Magos believed to be the core of Santiago’s ‘Santiagoness’—grew into Monstrilio, a little furry lung-creature with an arm-tail sticking out from its left, Magos and Joseph projected their dead son onto it. To them, it was a miracle, a panacea if you will: it would bring back Santiago, it would fix their crumbling marriage, it would restore their lives to what it once was.
But as Monstrilio grew, it clearly demonstrated a non-Santiagoness. In fact, it wasn’t human at all, mauling small animals alive for fun and to eat. Magos asks Lena, her best friend and a surgeon, to remove Monstrilio’s arm-tail, thinking it to be the cause of its wildness. And for some time after its removal, Monstrilio did become meeker, or so they thought.
“They are happy to believe I forgot how they maimed me.”
Monstrilio, without its arm-tail, eventually grew into M, a young teenage boy with hardly anything on him reminiscent of his ‘Monstrilioness’ besides the stump on his left hip and a tuft of stubble on his forehead (his shaved fur). From his dialogue, M seems to separate himself from Santiago and Monstrilio distinctly, addressing them by ‘you’ in his thoughts.
However, M retains the memories from his time as Monstrilio, and occasionally memories from Santiago surfaces albeit little and faintly.
“Telling me I’m M does not afford the clarity they think it does.”
Like a child living for the first time still, M comes off mostly as innocent despite his wild instincts to consume meat flavoured with… fear. He questions who he is even as he tells Joseph, “This is M.”
In one of their conversations, Joseph notes that M asks him whether Joseph knew what he was without the hint of anger or malice that would've been expected of the situation. This comes towards the end of the book, after a series of events show M struggling between his Monstrilioness and Santiagoness.
Or rather, what he is and what he thinks he ought to be.
“But I won’t write this memory down. Seems silly. Keeping these. You’re not coming back.”
Magos throws a grand artistic act of grief in Berlin themed ‘SON’ on stage, and M watches along with Joseph and everybody else central at this point of the story.
She finally distinguishes between Santiago and Monstrilio or M (not that the difference between Monstrilio and M registered as much for her, though), wrecking her body with hopeless sobs and an out-of-breathness akin to her son’s dying breaths.
Then, perhaps tired of being perceived as either ‘Santiago the Clay’ and ‘Monstrilio the Incomplete’, M makes his own choice to fully assume his existence as the ‘Statue’.
He eats.
“But I don’t panic. The panic is not mine to carry anymore. I can let it go.”
And at the end, Magos and Joseph let him go, along with the lung of their son.
Verdict
Insanely unfiltered and heart-breaking, I would say ‘Monstrilio’ makes it to my list of great debut novels to read.
It succinctly pulls out the horror in tragedy, loss and grief, and centres the characters’ search for an identity within a tornado of emotions in the mix.
Personally, my favourite part of the story was exploring the becoming of M—I wouldn't say it was an unapologetic becoming, but the element of pacing back and forth between wanting to be yourself and holding back because of the perception of others made it ever so real and raw.
Overall, I rate ‘Monstrilio’ an 8 out of 10. It's so worth the read for those wanting something horrifically satisfying, and you can finish it in one sitting or over the weekend depending on your attention span.
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