With her mortuary assistant certificate hot off the presses, seventeen-year-old Meka Redwood is ready to start her career working in her parents’ mortuary and funeral home. Her parents are a little odd—her old school father isn’t great with people and her mother has a health condition that heavily restricts her diet—but their differences fuel her own oddness: her passion for working with the dead. Her friends and Noah, her boyfriend, are supportive if skeptical and more than a little grossed out by her professional choices. The future seems bright for Meka.
A sudden, tragic death shatters her world. It shatters again when she discovers they aren’t dead after all, that there are more than a few reanimated corpses running around upstate New York, and that she has inherited her family’s talent for turning the dead into the undead. This puts her in the crosshairs of some very dangerous people who want her power for their own deadly reasons. The past comes back to haunt the present, and Meka must be ready to face it.
The pacing might be a point of contention for some readers. The first two thirds of the book are slower and more thoughtful, while the last stretch is breakneck action. In comparison to contemporary young adult horror, which often favors immediate acceleration and tension, the pacing of Make Me a Monster sets it apart. It’s most noticeable with Meka’s friends. They’re central to her life in the beginning, and readers spend a lot of time hanging out with them and Meka. Yet they drop off so abruptly from the story that in retrospect they seem more like plot devices than characters. Unusually for a young adult novel, Meka’s mother works alongside her daughter as they try to solve the larger mystery instead of her disappearing for most of the book and leaving the teens to do all the work. I like this shift from the norm, but wish it hadn’t come at the expense of Meka’s friends.
In terms of pacing I think Bayron’s story fares better when compared to the original source material, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. (This isn’t a direct retelling, more like a loose remix also lightly influenced by Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven.”) Like many other Victorian-era proto-horror and proto-science fiction novels, Frankenstein has a lot of set-up, conversations, and description, and not as much frantic action. Likewise, Bayron thrives on the gradual reveal. It was a little too slow for my preference, but not in a burdensome way.
I would’ve liked a bigger conversation about race, racism, and mortuaries. Black funeral homes play important roles in the Black community, such as during the Civil Rights Movement, when they often buried Black activists killed by white supremacists. Ithaca, New York doesn’t have a large Black community, and obviously Meka’s family serve the whole town, regardless of race, but I wish there had been at least some discussion about the larger historical and social context of that work and how the Redwoods feel about their place in that tradition. The undercurrent of slavery and Jim Crow are present, particularly at the end with the reveal of the Big Bad, but I would’ve liked it to be a little more underlined. Maybe I’m just being too much of a history nerd, but this book skipped over quite a few big questions I think were worth asking.
As much as there is romance in this novel, it’s not a capital-R Romance. That would have set up a much darker, much more horrific ending than Bayron opted for. The romance is sweeping in that way all teenage love stories feel. For Meka and Noah, this is their first real relationship; they are each other’s first love, and Noah’s death is the first real test of the staying power of this relationship. Their love feels epic when they’re in it and like the end of the world when it’s threatened. That said, don’t come into this horror-romance expecting too many romance tropes. Although that might sound like a complaint, I actually think Bayron balanced the horror and the romance well. They feed on each other in invigorating ways. Without the romance, this is a flat, emotionless monster story, and without the horror, the romance has no bite.
For teen readers, I expect the big appeal will be how Bayron twists Frankenstein into something recognizable yet wholly different. Most kids read Mary Shelley’s gothic novel at some point in their English classes (often in 10th grade), so they’ll have some basic knowledge about what Bayron is going for. Both books cover similar thematic territory, such as mortality, ambition in power and knowledge, man as monster, natural versus unnatural, family versus isolation and exclusion, among others. To see Frankenstein get reimagined as a horror-romance with a Black cast will likely be a big draw for teens.
Make Me a Monster is a powerful new story from a YA author who always has something exciting to say. Overall, another success for Kalynn Bayron.
Make Me A Monster is published by Bloomsbury YA.
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Make Me A Monster
