No sign of Frankenstein here
Bayron has written a number of YA novels now and Make Me A Monster is the latest. Pitched as a retelling of Frankenstein it is, really, anything but that. Sure there are walking dead and lost love but that’s where the similarities end.
The story ostensibly follows Meka a young women who doesn’t seem to study or attend school because she’s actually become qualified at preparing the dead for being buried.
The premise is what captured me but this does not really deliver on that premise. A solidly written YA take on Frankenstein, worrying about hubris and horror and loneliness and creativity and power and gender imbalances and the difference between humanity and monstrousness would be epic. I would love to read that book.
Make Me A Monster is not that book. It does not tell that tale and what it does tell is clumsy and disappointing. For me YA comes in a variety of formats, not least very simplified sentence structure and world building all the way through to exceptional depth challenging material, brilliant worlds and full of emotional depth. As a person with two children who are just emerging from the age group this is targeting I’ve read my share of YA and there are some that are great and there are some that aren’t – which is just about normal. YA can come across as poorly written – indeed the quality of the prose is not one that people normally remark upon although I maintain that writing for a target audience such as young adults is a discipline all on its own that is extremely hard to get right.
Bayron’s writing here is at the very simplistic end of the affair which is fine. What wasn’t fine was that she did not seem to know how mortuaries and funeral parlours worked, what the regulations in place are or even what conflicts of interest might be. The language was missing (I ended up looking at what people in this profession called dead bodies and it isn’t the word used in the book).
Add to that a lack of depth to any of the characters and some really odd character decisions and I found myself worried from about a quarter of the way through that this wasn’t really going to end well. That solidified when the inciting incident didn’t arrive until I was solidly half way through the book.
What Bayron absolutely did get right for me was her depiction of the impact of grief on a young person. We all respond differently to loss but the one in this book feels real, feels lived and that’s great even if it’s a choice that ends up impacting significantly on the pacing of the book (until it doesn’t).
I think part of the problem here is that this was sold to me as a YA retelling of Frankenstein. It has none of that classic’s energy, its horror, its existential angst. Instead it’s a romance set in a funeral home where the dead don’t stay dead and, lo and behold, that includes people who are presented as alive at the start of the story.
If it had been pitched as that I would still have picked it up but I wouldn’t have expected the fire and moral muscle of Frankenstein that are so lacking here. That’s only part of the problem for me though. Make Me A Monster lacks any narrative urgency, lacks any moral sensibility except to think through how one can avoid loss and grief and with no reflection on whether that’s a good or a bad desire it feels particularly one note.
It’s a huge shame because this kind of setting could be fantastic if handled with an eye to deeper world building, a wider social setting (this world is so sparely populated it was hard to understand how so many dead bodies kept turning up to be prepared for their funerals) and a decent edit that expanded the second half of the book and condensed the first. This is irritating to reflect upon as a reviewer because part of my criticism here is that I wish it were a different book – notably the book promised on the back cover blurb. I maintain that a decent critic has to review a work on its own merits regardless of what they would have done.
Unfortunately, as it’s probably clear by now, Make Me A Monster doesn’t work for me on its own strengths – its pacing is lacklustre, its story takes far too long to set out what it’s doing, the writing lacks nuance even given that it’s at the simplistic end of YA and the characters are painfully thin.
If it’s Gothic, I want dreadful horror, faded luxury, lost loves and examinations of selfhood and being. If it’s horror I want something that has body horror or frights or grotesquery. All these things are missing in Make Me A Monster which feels like it can’t ever commit to the horror elements genre. I spent more time thinking this was keener on being The Fault In Our Stars than a version of the dystopian science fiction romance horror that is Frankenstein.
--
The Math
Highlights:
- The undead
- Great portrayal of grief
Nerd coefficient: 4/10, a disappointing YA horror romance that doesn't really land the premise.Reference: Bayron, Kalynn,
Make Me A Monster [Bloomsbury, 2025
].
STEWART HOTSTON is an author of all kinds of science fiction and fantasy. He's also a keen Larper (he owns the UK Fest system, Curious Pastimes). He's a sometime physicist and currently a banker in the City of London. A Subjective Chaos, BSFA and BFA finalist he's also Chair of the British Science Fiction Association and Treasurer for the British Fantasy Society. He is on bluesky at: @stewarthotston.com.
