4 out of 4 stars
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Book review: The Different Kinds of Monsters, by Seth Chambers
This interesting and gripping story begins during September 2001, in a deceptively ordinary and almost mundane manner in a hospital where we meet the central character, Dylan Armitage, who has come to visit his father who has been injured in a mysterious accident at his home. Despite his serious injuries and age his father is still an indomitable, tough, and hard talking character who still manages to intimidate his son from his hospital bed.
It is only when his father questions him insistently about Emily, a dinosaur whose fossilised skeleton was on display at a museum, which Dylan first encountered when he was only six years old and became a life-long obsession of his, that one realises that the story is going to be slightly unusual. His father’s injuries are mysterious and appear to be the result of an attack from a large carnivorous beast and the doctors are at a loss to explain them. Although alarmed by this news, Dylan rationalises to himself that the injuries are probably the result of an accident caused by his aging father’s renovation attempts on the old house that he is staying at, however, his father still insists that it was Emily, the dinosaur, that had attacked him. Fearing to provoke his father’s wrath, Dylan chooses not to argue with him about it.
At this stage the author flashes back to Dylan’s childhood life in the nineteen seventies, and to his memories of a lonely and unstable childhood in which his parents were always on the move because of a continuing necessity to escape the legal consequences of his father’s volatile temper and acts of violence. Despite his socially violent nature, his father had always been a hardworking and caring family man who never raised his hand to his wife or Dylan, except for one incident at the museum, when he had lashed out at him and injured him severely, in front of the skeleton of the dinosaur. This had been the first, and the last incident when his father had been physically violent towards him.
Dylan’s visit to his father in hospital occurs during the historic month of September 2001 but the author skilfully flashes back to describe his lonely childhood and obsession with dinosaurs, super comic book heroes and science fiction. He also recalls how, somehow and mysteriously, the skeleton of Emily also seems to follow them and appear at museums close to where they are staying, much to the ire of his father. Despite his love for monsters such as dinosaurs and particularly for Emily, he is also fascinated by fictional monsters, such as, The Hulk, in his comic books. He longs to be like Bruce Banner, the weak and docile scientist who turns into a green monster when provoked and scared. As he grows up, Dylan soon discovers monsters in the human world that are terrifyingly real, and his unpleasant encounters with them will continue to haunt him for the rest of his life, as will Emily, the ancient dinosaur who perished millennia ago, but now appears to Dylan to be alive again, and somehow following him and his family in their endless travels.
Emily was actually a female dinosaur named after Emily Marigate, the woman who discovered her fossilised skeleton, and is classified as an Allosaurus fragilus, a dinosaur similar to, but smaller than, the famed Tyrannosaurus Rex. The author takes us back in a fascinating journey back to the Late Jurassic Period, one hundred and fifty millions years ago, when dinosaurs still ruled the earth, and describes how Emily was born and how she learns to live in a hostile world inhabited by monsters and terrifying living conditions. In an absorbing and compelling parallel, the story alternates between Dylan and Emily’s life, and describes how they both learn to cope in the hostile worlds that they live in, whilst growing up and becoming monsters themselves. However the monsters in Emily’s prehistoric world are the dinosaurs whom Dylan loves, whilst the monsters in his own world are many of his fellow human beings, and later on, as he grows up and becomes an adult, himself as well.
Except for the picturesque and poignant narratives of Emily’s life, the story is written from the perspective of Dylan and follows the events of his tumultuous life up to the point where he visits his father in hospital. Now thirty odd years old, his life is in ruins because his wife has left him together with their young daughter, out of fear for their safety, and he has also lost his job as a respected school teacher. The subsequent events in his life, after his visit to his father, are as calamitous as the events that follow in the world after the attack on the twin towers which he watches on a television at the cheap hotel where he is staying. It is at this stage that he decides to follow his father’s wishes and try to find and destroy Emily who his father believes is very real now a danger to them all.
Unfortunately for him, violence and Emily seem to track him closely and Emily appears out of nowhere and brutally attacks and kills a police officer who stops to question him along a lonely road that he is travelling on. Forced to flee in order to escape retribution for Emily’s apparent actions he finally finds a relatively isolated place of solace and safety for himself where he spends time living alone and doing manual labour around the local town to earn some money. During this lonely period of his life he manages to visit his wife and daughter from time to time and for a while Emily seems to have left him for good. In the ensuing years, he and his wife eventually get divorced and his daughter grows up to be as provocative as her disturbed mother. Alone, in his favourite restaurant, one miserable night, and with a snowstorm raging outside, he is unexpectedly joined by his daughter who has managed to find him in his secret place of refuge. They get together and he is shocked when she tells him that Emily has become a part of her life.
As the story unfolds the actual reality of Emily continues to remain vaguely obscure and she appears to be an almost phantom-like entity lurking in the background of their lives. It is also interesting to note that nobody else appears to actually observe her as a dinosaur moving around in the modern world until, in an exciting climax, when all seems to be lost for Dylan and his daughter, as they are kidnapped and both held captive and assaulted by his old childhood teacher and molester together with the corrupt local police marshal and his deputies, Emily makes a dramatic appearance and attacks his tormentors. In the ensuing chaos his daughter manages to flee with him to a place of safety where she looks after him while he recovers from his injuries that he sustained from their captors.
Eventually they are joined by his father, and for a while, Emily appears to have left them, and they are comfortably isolated from the rest of the world. However, matters don’t remain like that for long, and in an unpleasant turn of events, their relative peace is shattered when Dylan’s father catches him and his daughter in an apparently compromising situation together. Furious with him, his father attacks him outside the house but suffers a serious stroke and dies before Dylan can get him to a hospital. Confused and upset, his daughter blames him for her grandfather’s death and decides to leave him again.
Alone again, and living in the remote and isolated park filled with the statues of dinosaurs that he and his father once restored together, when they briefly stayed there for a while, Dylan formulates a plan to lure Emily to him so that he can finally destroy her. Despite the fact that Emily actually appears to be terrifyingly real in some of the scenes in the story, all of this is described from Dylan’s point of view and there remains some doubt as to her actual physical reality and whether she has merely been an illusion of his troubled mind and nothing but a monstrous side of himself throughout his troubled life? The story ends dramatically as he executes his plan, and lures Emily to come to him, one last time, so that he can finally destroy her.
This is an intriguingly original and well written book, portraying the dramatic psychological aspects of childhood emotional and physical abuse vividly and convincingly. The descriptions of Emily and her life in an ancient Late Jurassic Period world are also absorbing and skilfully woven alongside the plot. An unusual and disturbing story, but also, compelling and interesting reading. I have given this book a rating of 4 out of 4 stars.
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The Different Kinds Of Monsters
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