Monsters

Monsters is a collection of wild, weird, and whimsical tales with a twist. These stories are not about mythical creatures; here, the creatures speak for themselves. There’s an orc who hates Tolkien, a young demon awash in teenage angst, an angel abandoned by Jesus who finds the Fates. Jensen creates a world both delicately dreamlike and all too real, where the villain is sometimes the victim and evil is not always what we thought. If stories teach us how to be human, then the stories in Monsters are the ones we need now. These are fractured fairy tales for grown ups, where the roots of sadism are laid bare and the horrors of human supremacism are firmly faced. But as in all of Jensen’s work, love is both always possible and also a call to action. By turns macabre, melancholy, and magical, these stories will leave you wondering who the real monsters are and how they can be defeated.

I asked artists to illustrate the stories. The illustrations are, I think fantastic. There are 49 of them.

Contents and Excerpts

Reviews

September 2017, from Publishers Weekly