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A review by helterskelliter
Man Made Monsters by Andrea L. Rogers
5.0
“Greed and avarice have no mercy. I became merciless, too.” (18)
In this bone-chilling and cutting debut novel, readers navigate a cosmology of monsters, transcending space and time.
Drawing from Cherokee beliefs and stories, this collection explores not only traditional monsters but also the very real, very terrifying human monsters that so often haunt and threaten indigenous lives.
But, beyond that, this collection also introduces many readers to Cherokee and indigenous understandings of time, space, relationships, storytelling, and nature. Cherokee language appears throughout these stories and their illustrations and the non-linearity of Cherokee language is a central feature of this collection, each story occurring almost as if just in another room of a larger house in which all these characters live.
And, these stories are quite horrifying.
Whether the monster within is a creature, a force, or another human, this is truly scary collection of tales.
Personally, I found “Snow Day” to be the most wholly horrific of the collection. This story perfectly articulated the very real horror of “almost”. What almost happens in this story is something so real it’s almost too scary to just be a scary story. The pacing up to the “big scare” is so well executed. This story both chilled me to the bone and somehow warmed my heart. It’s the most peculiarly perfect scare I’ve had in a while—a thought I had often while navigating this collection.
Overall, I can’t highly recommend this collection enough! I think it’s both a well-conceived collection of horror stories and a critical exploration of storytelling about the indigenous experience as told by indigenous creators.
Before this collection, I only knew the bare minimum of Cherokee culture as taught in my white-centric history classes—which, is to say, I knew nothing.
In this bone-chilling and cutting debut novel, readers navigate a cosmology of monsters, transcending space and time.
Drawing from Cherokee beliefs and stories, this collection explores not only traditional monsters but also the very real, very terrifying human monsters that so often haunt and threaten indigenous lives.
But, beyond that, this collection also introduces many readers to Cherokee and indigenous understandings of time, space, relationships, storytelling, and nature. Cherokee language appears throughout these stories and their illustrations and the non-linearity of Cherokee language is a central feature of this collection, each story occurring almost as if just in another room of a larger house in which all these characters live.
And, these stories are quite horrifying.
Whether the monster within is a creature, a force, or another human, this is truly scary collection of tales.
Personally, I found “Snow Day” to be the most wholly horrific of the collection. This story perfectly articulated the very real horror of “almost”. What almost happens in this story is something so real it’s almost too scary to just be a scary story. The pacing up to the “big scare” is so well executed. This story both chilled me to the bone and somehow warmed my heart. It’s the most peculiarly perfect scare I’ve had in a while—a thought I had often while navigating this collection.
Overall, I can’t highly recommend this collection enough! I think it’s both a well-conceived collection of horror stories and a critical exploration of storytelling about the indigenous experience as told by indigenous creators.
Before this collection, I only knew the bare minimum of Cherokee culture as taught in my white-centric history classes—which, is to say, I knew nothing.