Title: The Monstrumologist Series: The Monstrumologist #1
Author: Rick Yancey
Published: July 20, 2010
Genre(s): Horror
Page Count: 434
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:"These are the secrets I have kept. This is the trust I never betrayed. But he is dead now and has been for more than forty years, the one who gave me his trust, the one for whom I kept these secrets. The one who saved me . . . and the one who cursed me."
So starts the diary of Will Henry, orphaned assistant to Dr. Pellinore Warthrop, a man with a most unusual specialty: monstrumology, the study of monsters. In his time with the doctor, Will has met many a mysterious late-night visitor, and seen things he never imagined were real. But when a grave robber comes calling in the middle of the night with a gruesome find, he brings with him their most deadly case yet.
A gothic tour de force that explores the darkest heart of man and monster and asks the question: When does man become the very thing he hunts?
In this Printz Honor book, Rick Yancey delivers a gory teen monster-hunter novel that’s, well…gory’s about all I can say, because it’s really gory. The problem is that for all the gore, The Monstrumologist isn’t all that exciting, really. It’s slow, overwritten, and doesn’t have the most proactive protagonist. More mystifying, this very open-and-shut book has three (count them, three) sequels. Mostly I’m just underwhelmed.
Our protagonist is William James Henry, orphaned at 12 years old and now living with a possibly sociopathic scientist whose specialty is monsters. Mostly, Will Henry just sits around and does whatever this scientist dude tells him to do, so I didn’t personally find him to be interesting at all. The star of The Monstrumologist is most certainly the monstrumologist himself, so having Will Henry as the protagonist at all was mystifying. Will Henry just didn’t do anything.
On top of a protagonist who doesn’t do anything, we have a book that doesn’t seem to go anywhere until well past the halfway point. Yancey writes in a very purple faux-Victorian style that’s cloying and oppressive. It doesn’t ring true at all, and just bogs down the entire story. I assume The Monstrumologist is supposed to be a fast-paced monster story, but it isn’t, because we’re often stuck with Will Henry’s overlong philosophizing (because, again, he’s 12 years old and doesn’t really do anything important).
So, you could say this book was boring, because it was. At the same time, when I managed to find my way through the truly overwritten, overdone prose, the story itself is very interesting. The story isn’t boring, but the writing and main character are. It’s like this book has some gunk on it that just needs to be cleared away, as underneath it’s actually something of value. Too bad Rick Yancey didn’t bother to do some extra polishing.
All in all, I’m not terribly impressed with The Monstrumologist. It’s a very explicit monster story when it wants to be, bother otherwise Yancey’s storytelling is plain dull. I’m not planning on picking up the sequels, partly because I didn’t love this book, but also because the epilogue seems to have satisfactorily concluded things in an open-ended way. Most books, I find, are better on their own, without the author dragging the character through various trials again and again.
