Book Review: Delicious Monsters by Liselle Sambury

After I finished reading this harrowing yet ultimately cathartic novel, I felt like my skin had been scoured clean, as if the emotional wringer I had just gone through had been so powerful that it left a physical effect on my body. Delicious Monsters is a tremendous achievement, a haunted house novel that talks about generational abuse and the ways that shame and silence are wielded, against Black women in particular, to protect those in power.

Brittney is a videographer interning with Torte, a media company that took an interest in the series she was filming with her best and possibly only friend, Jayden. Torte hired the college students to continue producing the show—an Internet series about the strange and supernatural—under their umbrella. After two hit seasons, the friends are ready to set their sights on a subject that is deeply personal to Brittney: the “Miracle Mansion” where people end up transformed for the better, if they’re lucky. If they’re not lucky, they end up dead.

Ten years ago, Grace Odlin took her teenage daughter Daisy with her from Toronto to live on a small island in the relatively remote city of Timmins, Ontario. The paperwork had finally come through, allowing Grace to inherit a family mansion she wanted to use to provide herself and her daughter with both a steady income and an affordable place to live. 

Daisy was glad enough to move after a disastrous breakup made her do some questionable things. Besides, Grace had always dangled the prospect of owning the mansion like a carrot in front of her. The implicit agreement had been that once they had the financial stability that renting out the manor house would provide, young Daisy could finally be free of taking responsibility for her odd, distant mother, and perhaps start living for herself.

But strange things kept happening on the island and at what Daisy would quickly grow to believe was a house haunted by multiple ghosts. While Grace’s conversion of the mansion to an AirBnB was successful from the start, Daisy’s mental state began to swiftly deteriorate. Even as guests like Brittney’s mother raved about their therapeutic experiences staying there, Daisy’s own psyche was unraveling, culminating in a series of assaults and deaths that would, a decade on, inspire two crusading film-makers to ask questions about the Black girls of Miracle Mansion whom everyone else seemed to want to forget.

One of them, however, has an ulterior motive:

This is more than the mystery of Daisy and Grace.

 

This is more than forgotten Black girls and dead bodies.

 

This is about the place where my mom’s life changed forever on a last-minute getaway she took with a boyfriend ten years ago when Grace first opened the place. It doesn’t matter if she actually transformed the way she said she did. She became a different person. But not a better one. Just different.

 

Her lies aren’t only masking my pain. They’re concealing the pain that’s in that house. The things that we need to bring to light. I can’t talk about the bits of our relationship behind her shiny new veneer, but I can talk about Daisy and discover what really happened in that house.

Brittney and her mom have a strained relationship that has the young woman seeing parallels with Daisy and Grace’s own difficult ties. But Brittney, unlike the Odlins, doesn’t believe in ghosts—that’s more Jayden’s department. Will her personal biases cloud her judgment, and possibly endanger her life, when the filmmakers finally arrive at that secluded island to investigate the Miracle Mansion in person?

This is a truly bone-chilling novel of horror and grief, that in Liselle Sambury’s masterful hands becomes something almost impossible to put down. I finished its 500 or so pages in a little over a day because I was desperate to know what happened next. And I wasn’t just invested in the brilliantly constructed plot. I cared so much about Ms Sambury’s flawed, hurting characters, these damaged people who were trying their best to grapple with their pain and find a way to redemption. A large part of my empathy sprang from how she depicts her characters as eminently relatable people, as here where Daisy is having a conversation with a neighbor and schoolmate who just might turn into a friend:

“And in case you actually care, the popularity thing only happened in the last couple years.” He shrugged, though it seemed forced. “I dunno, maybe everyone suddenly realized that I’m tall and good-looking.”

 

“Is that so?”

 

“I do own mirrors. There is nothing wrong with being aware of what you look like. I’m a good-looking guy, you’re a good-looking girl. It’s pretty obvious even though it’s technically subjective.”

 

My eyebrows climbed near my hairline. “Is that you shooting your shot?”

 

“No. You honestly seem like a lot of work, and I’m trying to live a reasonably lazy life.”

These moments of levity also work to keep the horrors of Miracle Mansion from overwhelming both the cast and the reader, though I freely admit to needing to lie down after finishing this book and take a nice long break before being able to crack open the next one. This is the kind of book that wrings your heart and shakes your soul, if you’ll let it. I’m so glad I did, and hope you will, too.