Book Review: The Monstrumologist by Rick Yancey

Yancey, Rick. The Monstrumologist. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009.

"Why are you here, boy?" he asked suddenly, giving my shoulder a hard squeeze. "This is no business for children."

"My parents died in a fire, sir," I answered. "The doctor took me in."

"The doctor," Erasmus echoed. "They call him that — but what exactly is he a doctor of?"

The grotesque, I might have answered. The bizarre. The unspeakable. Instead I gave the same answer the doctor had given me when I'd asked him not long after my arrival at the house on Harrington Lane. "Philosophy," I said with little conviction.

When Will Henry takes his father's place as apprentice to Dr. Pellinore Winthrop, he soon realizes the job entails more than just staying up late with the lonely doctor and fetching tools or making meals. It's a job that may require him to risk his own life in order to protect the entire New England coast.

This book will be a huge hit with the teens that enjoy the macabre. Dark, and tons of violence. If you get squeamish at the thought of blood, this is not the book for you. The writing is excellent, as well as the monsters, who go by the name of Anthropophagi. The Anthropophagi are man-eating, headless monstrosities that can crush a human skull between their hands--and often do. Luckily, there's a very good reason for them being where our protagonists just happen to be. Plot and character development are solid. It's definitely a step out of the ordinary teen books we've been seeing lately. Even though there are monsters, we get to hate them the way we were meant to, and there is zero romance.

Some parts do drag, just a little. We're supposed to be reading a diary, but I didn't get that "in the head of the character" feeling that I usually get with diary novels. It was much more narrative than it should have been. Well-written narrative? Absolutely. But not as gripping as it could have been. And yes, it's predictable, but that's because we always know that good triumphs over evil in horror stories (unless you're Stephen King, in which everyone usually ends up miserable in some way or another) and we know that Will has to survive because we saw him as an old man in the beginning of the book. Still, well worth reading if you want to be creeped out.

And feel free to celebrate, horror lovers, because this is the first in a series. Let's hope this is the novel that reawakens a love of horror stories, like the good old days when Stephen King, Lois Duncan and R.L. Stine were at the top of their game.