Review: A serial killer haunts Lauren Beukes’ riveting ‘Broken Monsters’

Lauren Beukes’ captivating “Broken Monsters” defies the standard tropes of the serial killer genre to become a thoroughly modern, supernatural thriller set against the backdrop of a crumbling American city (Detroit) attempting to piece itself back together.

The novel effortlessly weaves multiple narrative threads as a fascinating cast of characters interacts with a place often portrayed as “the country’s mecca of ruined dreams.” Although it’s centered on a woman hunting a serial killer, it’s just as much about Detroit, those who exploit it and those who have not given up on it.

Beukes is South African, yet this is her second novel set in an American city: Her much-lauded 2013 novel, “The Shining Girls,” features a time-traveling serial killer who skids across the chronological surface of Chicago. In both books, she plays with genre in a slippery but propulsive way, fusing together fantasy, crime fiction and a hint of social critique.

“Broken Monsters” follows Det. Gabrielle Versado over the course of 10 days as she tries to catch a serial killer dubbed the Detroit Monster. It opens with Versado investigating the murder of a young black boy, Daveyton Lafonte, whose torso has been fused with a fawn’s lower half. The result is a kind of mutilated, mythological P.T. Barnum gaff.

Beukes raises uncomfortable questions about race and class at every turn. To get the public interested in the boy’s death, “because if it’s not a little blonde white girl, you need a human interest angle,” the police craft a narrative to the press about Daveyton being emblematic of “Detroit’s plucky survivor spirit,” now snuffed out.

Jonno Haim, a thirtysomething failed writer from New York, has parachuted into Detroit as a citizen journalist to tell the “real” untold story of the city’s blight. He navigates through abandoned factories and squats to highlight Detroit’s poor and dejected in a quest to find the city’s most startling ruin porn. In Jonno, Beukes has created a character both out of touch and realistic, bearing a resemblance to any number of reporters who hop in and out of cities trying to break the most context-less sensationalist stories.

Jonno entangles himself in tracking the city’s serial killer while cataloging Detroit’s “ghost city” and its artist gentrifiers. The “Monster” himself is plagued by a schizophrenic and supernatural “dream” that propels him to create ghastly monstrosities to achieve artistic fame, or in this case, infamy. Like a more extreme version of Jonno, the killer craves the limelight with little regard for its costs and sees himself as an artist without an audience. These two have found the perfect complement in each other.

The book’s main characters are connected by nightmarish hallucinations, and while Beukes’ supernatural touch is a refreshing addition to the crime fiction genre, the source of these phantasms is somewhat opaque and mildly frustrating, though beautifully drawn and full of doom. In one of the novel’s more harrowing scenes, a woman’s tattoo comes to life, and “beaks attached to dark feathered heads, slick with blood and bright black eyes,” poke out of her chest as black birds erupt from her collarbone.

One wouldn’t expect to find rich commentary on the nature of representation or the dangers of growing up in an era of Snapchat or revenge porn slipped into a taut and sometimes terrifying page turner. But Beukes swings it, offering thought-provoking takes on peddling misfortune and “truth.” There is a tense push-pull between the inhabitants of Detroit and their gentrifying occupiers about who is allowed to create the narrative of city and who is the most reliable narrator of perceptions of the place.

“Broken Monsters” holds up a mirror to those who rabidly hit refresh in search of more dehumanizing gore and those who wish to be a star in the atrocity exhibition.

Waclawiak is the author of “How to Get Into the Twin Palms.”

Broken Monsters
A Novel

Lauren Beukes
Mulholland/Little, Brown: 436 pp., $26