Ancient Horror History Unearthed: Mongster by Randall Boyll REVIEWED

I imagine/recall a time perpetuated by reading books like Mongster.

It's the early 90s. The reader and prospective buyer of such books, is inside the local book chain...for me it was between Waldenbooks or a smaller company, Discount Booksellers. In either one, the audience had a good six towering shelves to choose from. All lined with books screaming "BUY ME, BUY ME! I WAS WRITTEN BY THE NEXT STEPHEN KING!" and several loud alarms garrishly blare such. Sometimes it was a quote by King himself, others it was a review blurb saying so. Other times, it was just some loud and flashy artwork that promised that while it wasn't King quality, if you liked spooky stuff, you'd like this one.

Of course, by the early nineties, the genre had been run into the ground, leaving the writers and publishers to grasp at straws to figure out how to sell these damn books.

I think the pressure of the industry niche's looming doom inadvertently put pressure on the author of this stuff to get a bit more inventive. Or wildly more so.

By and large, of my reading sample anyway, the more outrageous, more adventurous books came out towards the end of horror's reign on booksales.

I've never, ever read anything as self-aware as Mongster from this era. It's really quite fascinating...but I'll get back to that in a few.

Mongster sports some pretty standardly cool artwork, but also in searing red font, alerts us that this is work written by a "SPLENDID NEW HORROR WRITER!". I am not sure if I would have been sold in January 1991, when this book came and went with the flurry of similar reading content with little fanfare, but I'll sure as hell tell you now, that Mongster, Randall Boyll's work I've read in general, is absolutely splendid.

It's as far from standard as these books get. Sure, it takes a pretty standard premise of "abused preteen gets supernatural revenge" is as beaten as the book's protagonist, Arnold, but it's told in such a way, with such masterful writing that it ekes its own identity.

It's an identity that's well worth reading.

As I said, Mongster focuses on a 13 year old boy named Arnold who basically has been dealt the worst hand life can hand you. He's poor, his dad took off, his stepfather is an abusive, alcoholic demon of a man and his mother is generally a weeping, helpless mess.

The most recent round of step-dad's vicious beatings have ended up with Arnold in the hospital. The hospitalization totally switches things up for the boy, however, when his roommate shares the whereabouts of an ancient treasure, complete with werewolf-mummy hybrid guardian to grant his every wish...including gruesome revenge.

But wait, there's more.

The story twists and turns in ways you'd never expect, and in outlandish, but oh so entertaining ways...it even incorporates Stephen King into it's rich plot!

Much of the book details the various mishaps that Arnold goes through, the gaggle of evil losers on his tail trying to get a hold of his treasure, and really doesn't kick into full blown Horror until the last 40 pages or so.

If you can get past that, you will have a fantastic opportunity to embrace the quality of story here, the great writing Boyll produced and an honest attempt to do something fairly different while maintaining the integrity of the genre, playing it just safe enough to engage Horror readership of the day.

Mongster is a breath of fresh air that holds up decades after its publishing. The abuse that Arnold endures is wildly over the top and for long stretches of the book, very little in the way of supernatural horror, which is ultimately what the book wants to be sold as, are the things that may deter readers, and at times deterred me. But lots of these books, as inpermissable as it may be, feature pretty vulgar child abuse in their pages. It's almost like a standard trope. At the very least, Arnold gets a very cool revenge on his abusers.

Regardless of it's mild obstacles, Mongster gets my full recommendation, with its killer plot-twists, cool self-aware qualities and beautiful written set-pieces.

If you see a copy, grab it.

4.5/5