Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes

 

This looks from all appearances like a pretty standard-issue serial killer thriller, of the sort that flooded bookstore shelves in the wake of Thomas Harris and Hannibal Lecter. There are all sorts of relationships that are making all sorts of tensions, and there are some other threads that seem to be pulling at some sort of right angle to the main line of the story. Then it takes a turn toward the weird, the strange and lands in some weird supernatural Horror place, and at least most of those threads turn out to be playing other structural roles as well, helping to hold the story in place, sort of, while it goes into this strange "What if Jame Gumb was some sort of divine herald?" place. That supernatural element is reasonably well-handled, but still deeply jarring; these are perhaps genres that do not entirely play nicely together. I'm not going to slag on this book: It's ambitious, and it's remarkably well-written, with good prose and good dialogue, and a pretty good depiction of 2014 Detroit, especially considering the author isn't from anywhere near it.