Monsters We Have Made

Starck’s (Noah’s Wife) latest explores the power behind stories as it meditates on the inherent traumas of parenthood. Sylvia Gray loved her family, which included her adoring husband, Jack, and beautiful, precocious daughter, Faye. That vision of a perfect family dissolves after nine-year-old Faye and her friend repeatedly stab their babysitter on the orders of an entity called the Kingman. This event tears the family apart. Thirteen years later, Faye is missing, and she’s left behind her young daughter, Sylvia’s granddaughter. Sylvia tries to find Faye, going deeper into the Kingman’s world, a world that once swallowed her daughter and might also consume her. While the Kingman bears many similarities to the Internet-famous Slender Man, this unsettling story is no mere copycat. Starck has stacked this tale full of layers of evocative descriptions and fractured family drama that reads as both a beautifully written dream journal and a psychological dissection of its characters. Narrator Patricia Santomosso bares Sylvia’s soul to the reader as Sylvia struggles with the guilt caused by her daughter’s crime.