A kinky modern-day Aesop’s Fable
Reviewing Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova
A grieving mother in Mexico City cuts out a piece of her dead son’s lung and nurtures it until it gains sentience. That’s the striking premise of Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova, billed as a meditation on grief, acceptance, and the monstrous sides of love and loyalty. Does it deliver? Read this week’s IF YOU GO AWAY to find out what I thought, alongside a roundup of other novels I’ve read recently.
I’m P M Buchan, a former comic-book writer and lover of horror and dark art. I’ve written monthly columns and comic strips for Starburst and SCREAM: The Horror Magazine. I’ve collaborated with award-winning artists including John Pearson, Martin Simmonds and Ben Templesmith, and have been interviewed by Kerrang! and Rue Morgue. My work has been reviewed by Famous Monsters of Filmland, Fortean Times and Times Literary Supplement. I’ve collaborated with bands including Megadeth and Harley Poe, and written for clients including Lionsgate and Heavy Metal Magazine.
Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova
Billed by its publisher as “a thought-provoking meditation on grief, acceptance, and the monstrous sides of love and loyalty”, Monstrilio is a story that begins with a grieving mother in Mexico City who cuts out a piece of her dead son’s lung and nurtures it until it gains sentience. The narrative then follows the fractured family as they struggle to accommodate a monstrous creature who acts as a substitute for, but cannot replace, the son who they lost.
A quick glance at the blurb and the gorgeous cover design were enough to entice me to read Monstrilio. Once I’ve made the decision to read a novel, I prefer to go in cold with as little information as possible, taking it as a complete artwork and finding out more about the creator afterwards if it captures my imagination. In this case, however, I feel like I misinterpreted the sort of book Monstrilio was going to be, which worked against my enjoyment.
Goodreads describes Monstrilio as “A literary horror debut about a boy who transforms into a monster”, and so I was expecting a strange, hybrid story that fell somewhere between a meditation on grief and a literary horror. In reality, Monstrilio is more of a kinky modern-day Aesop’s Fable about sex positivity and acceptance.
Monstrilio is as much horror-adjacent for including cannibalistic monsters as Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight was horror-adjacent for using vampires as an allegory for chaste Mormon romance.
Welcome to the Little Shop of Horrors
Monstrilio is neatly divided into four consecutive sections, each narrated by a different character. The first section, narrated by the grieving mother, is overwhelmingly the strongest. It depicts difficult and irrational characters who are believable but hard to like, lost in the dreamlike limbo of grief. Here, the authorial voice, theme and style were unified, working together in service of a plot that had direction and momentum. The strength of the opening section propelled me through the book, despite diminishing returns with each subsequent shift in perspective.
Ostensibly, it seemed at first like Monstrilio would be a novel about parental grief, about the splintering relationships of a family driven apart by emotions too primal to resist, and then perhaps about the tentative, transitory peace granted by refusing to process their loss and instead forcibly prolonging the existence of their dead son. There’s a meaningful melancholy to the first section and dark, Little Shop of Horrors-like hints at the cost of raising and protecting a flesh-eating monster. By the second section, however, it felt like all curiosity to explore difficult themes or interrogate these concepts had evaporated.
Shifting gears from tragedy to Very Modern Fable
The novel begins with a conventional family, coalescing around the absence of a child. Within pages of the second section, the concept of biological kinship gives way to the more modern idea of a chosen family. The transition is jarringly abrupt, skipping from concepts of parenthood at the end of section one to a family friend detailing her reliance on prostitutes as soon as section two opens.
The monster’s chosen family conveniently overlaps with the blood relatives from the first section, but the new configurations of their subsequent relationships leaves no question that the narrative has morphed into a fable about acceptance and inclusivity.
"My mother thought I was a monster and didn't love me because of it. This thing, an actual fucking monster, was loved." – Gerardo Sámano Córdova
Everything that happens in the final three sections of Monstrilio seems to prioritise the author’s goal of creating a world where characters have no need to explain themselves and are loved and accepted fully, without prejudice. Unfortunately, this goal is achieved at the expense of character motivations, dramatic tension, and plot development. Any semblance of conflict dissolves under the auspices that compassion and time solve all problems.
A world without conflict
People talk a lot about show, don’t tell, when it comes to storytelling. I approached Monstrilio wanting to be shown reasons to empathise with a monster or a family doing monstrous things, but instead I was told that all monsters deserve empathy and that being a monster isn’t that monstrous, actually. Almost every named character in the book eventually comes to accept a flesh-eating cannibal, without reservation. The monster does nothing to earn this acceptance other than by being himself.
The central theme of the novel seems to be that we’re all on a journey supporting a monster as he learns to accept his true nature, so that we can love and celebrate him in the way that he deserves. Any early promise of emotional complexity or moral ambiguity is abandoned as the novel progresses.
I wanted to love Monstrilio, the novel and the eponymous monster. There’s definitely a spark of magic, both to the idea and its execution, but when it mattered most I felt like the story was let down by a lack of curiosity and an unwillingness to stress-test or interrogate its own themes. I wonder now if the first section, about the grieving family, fails to lead anywhere deeper because the novel empathises only with the perspective of the child seeking acceptance, ignoring the depth of the complicated, fallible parents who let him down.
Who will enjoy Monstrilio?
If you’re looking for a novel as escapism that prioritises representation, inclusivity and sex positivity, this one is likely to fit the bill. There’s clearly a large audience for novels like this in 2025. Alternatively, if you’re looking for a challenging horror that interrogates what it is to be or love a monster, I’d be more inclined to recommend:
Poppy Z Brite’s Exquisite Corpse – A genuinely transgressive horror novel about the complicated consequences of desire from an unsurpassed master of the genre.
Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho – A brutal satire of everything we came to celebrate about the 1980s, revealing the shallowness of a life that prioritises identity above all else.
Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is The Flesh – A savage dystopian horror about the ethics of factory farming and our propensity to dehumanise others when it becomes convenient to do so.
What else have I been reading?
Lest my deconstruction of Monstrilio feels too harsh, here’s a quick rundown of some other novels I’ve read recently. You might be able to gauge whether to heed my recommendations based on this selection.
Notably I didn’t feel motivated to write 1,000 words about any of the below despite enjoying them significantly, whereas I clearly had a lot of thoughts to process after getting to the end of Monstrilio.
Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
This was a first-time read for me and I unconditionally loved it. Sincere in its emotions, unafraid to depict the full spectrum of human emotion, and nostalgic in its unflinchingly honest depiction of childhood and the school experience for people of a certain age. I absolutely loved this one.
The Dark Between the Trees – Fiona Barnett
This folk-horror alternates between modern historians and soldiers who went missing during the English civil war in the 1600s, lost in a Blair Witch-esque cursed forest. The setup was promising and the writing style strong, but I felt deflated by the lack of resolution in the ending. Without any evident character growth or plot resolution, I couldn’t figure out what the author wanted to say or why the book had been written.
Witch Bottle – Tom Fletcher
Another folk-horror that left me a little cold. The premise was interesting and there were some haunting images, but ultimately I didn’t like any of the characters enough to care about their fates.
The Troop – Nick Cutter
The Troop reads like Lord of the Flies meets The Goonies, if every character were an unlikeable sociopath, they were all boys, and the author didn’t really have anything to say.
I was less offended by the frequent animal torture and grotesque physicality (which is normally a plus for me…) than I was disappointed because I had no investment in any one of the characters surviving. Almost every page of The Troop was filled with suffering, but because I didn’t empathise with the characters, it felt like I was allowing a lot of ugly into my head for no good reason.
Horror Movie – Paul Tremblay
Horror Movie restored my faith in horror novels. Great premise, brilliant book for anybody interested in the art of cinema. Never overtly scary, but imbued with uneasy dread throughout. Horror Movie is a weird and melancholic deconstruction of the price paid to create a cult classic, told by the survivor of a film that should never have existed. This was a story that has stayed with me.
The Churchgoer – Patrick Coleman
A very good slice of noir. It’s easy to see why Matthew McConaughey and Nic Pizzolatto were circling Churchgoer as a vehicle to reunite the True Detective creative team.
Galveston – Nic Pizzolatto
This was also a solid noir novel, but reading it made me feel like collaboration was what really elevated Pizzolatto’s style of storytelling to another level in True Detective, which remains one of the most powerful television series of all time.
Piranesi – Susanna Clarke
Piranesi was incandescently wonderful. If you haven’t read it, I can’t recommend it highly enough. What a joyful work of fiction.
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Did I miss the point of Monstrilio? Get in touch or leave a comment to let me know if Monstrilio worked for you, or if you can recommend something that I might enjoy more.