Order WHERE MONSTERS DWELL
I once had a boyfriend who claimed it was my biggest talent: figuring out the murderer in a mystery novel. But he didn't know me very well. And now that I think of it, I never gave him a decent blow job.''
My thirties have mercifully brought me much needed perspective on my own existence. I found out one important fact about myself: that I am fundamentally not a bad guy, but I'll often gleefully nvest myself in so many ill-fitting relationships and end up being perceived as such. For example, today I have to review WHERE MONSTERS DWELL, by Norwegian author Jorgen Brekke. Why did I agree to review this book? I don't know, but I did. Are there people who could possibly enjoy this miserable, clueless police procedural somewhere in multiverse? I don't know but if they exist, they're about to call me an asshole in the comment section.
There are several points of view in WHERE MONSTERS DWELL, but no dominant ones. Basically, two murders are committed, one in Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Virginia and one in a library in Trondheim, Norway. The murders are both grisly (involved beheading and skinning the victim) extremely similar and prompt the authorities to question themselves about their bizarre nature. What kind of killer are they actually chasing? What is the ideology behind his actions? The parallel investigations of Odd Singsaker and Felicia Stone are eventually going to head in the same direction and...and...will leave you scratching your head more than once.
I don't have a problem with Jorgan Brekke's writing. Even through translation, it's compelling. Often arresting, I'd say. He has a strong voice and his characterization is above average. It's everything else about WHERE MONSTERS DWELL that's completely absurd. Let's go methodically through what doesn't work here :
1) Poor research
WHERE MONSTERS WELL is a police procedural, yet none of the investigators seem competent. They make wild allegations that would make any seasoned crime readers cringe. For example Felicia Stone keeps bragging that she had a class on serial killers in college and therefore claims that the single murder she investigates on is the work of a serial killer because it bears eerie resemblance to Ed Gein's killings (because of the skinning).
Of course. The elaborate, sophisticated staging of a ritual murder in a freakin' museum bears resemblance to the work of a backwoods grave robber with a troublesome mental health and overbearing mommy issues who got locked up in a psychiatric institution until he died. If the investigators in a novel know less than the reader about their job, I've got a problem with that. Incompetent cops are not credible characters. Here's another fun quote for you. I laughed this one out loud.
''Murder was a form of human expression that humanity could do without. It was always messy, foul smelling, and disgusting. When he saw a dead bod, he always thought about the murderer and asked : Jesus Christ, you motherfucker, couldn't you have told us this some other way?''
2) Bizarre, hollow book love
This one's more of a pet peeve than an actual objective complaint. I'm not one of these people who love books as an object. Sure having a stacked book shelf is nice, but it's the content that I like, so loving the object always struck me as a little hollow and showoff-y. WHERE MONSTERS DWELL fancies itself as a book lovers' mystery and features plenty of bored people working around books, including a random mystery expert who's obsessed with blow jobs (I'm getting to that) and finding murderers in mystery novels.
The only two authors mentioned in this book are Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle (even if he is not actually named). I don't know about you but I would've expected to learn a thing or two about mysteries in a book that features ''mystery experts'', and I ended up being told things I know about two authors I have read when I was 20 or 21 years old. Poe and Doyle are pretty much mystery 101 for any reader. WHERE MONSTERS DWELL doesn't have an expertise on mystery fiction although it claims it.
3) Random blow jobs
It's as disturbing as it sounds. The aforementioned blow jobs are both willing and unwilling. The unwilling one is a HUGE trigger warning and a cheap plot twist. I don't know what is Jorgen Brekke's sick thing with blow jobs, but it happens all over WHERE MONSTERS DWELL and it's creepy.
According to its cover, WHERE MONSTERS DWELL was a #1 International Best-Seller, which I cannot explain for the love of me. Shit, if any no-name author would've tried to submit a manuscript like that, he would've got torn a new one by an editor for poor fact checking, misoginy and all-around creepiness. Novels like WHERE MONSTERS DWELL are the reason why I tightened up my review policy. I don't want to take engagement on garbage like this just because it loosely fits the editoral line of the site. So yeah, don't bother. There is just about a million better books (and probably 50,000 better police procedurals) waiting to be read). That's more than enough for you to avoid WHERE MONSTERS DWELL for a lifetime.