ON A BRIGHTLY lit stage in Berlin, a performing artist drapes her dead son’s pajamas over her lap and begins to cry. She cries “loud and unabashed” until her ponytail starts to unravel, and her face becomes swollen and red. Soon, the audience begins to cry too.
The artist is Magos, mother to Santiago, the boy who dies in the opening pages of Gerardo Sámano Córdova’s novel Monstrilio. When Santiago dies, his parents — Magos and Joseph — begin to drown in their grief. But where Joseph isolates himself, weeping endlessly, Magos does something strange. She cuts out a piece of her dead son’s lung, leaves Joseph, and retreats to her mother’s house in Mexico City.
Part family drama, part queer coming-of-age story, Sámano Córdova’s debut gracefully wields its horror elements while navigating the complexities of grief. Structurally, the novel unfolds in four unique perspectives: Magos, Lena, Joseph, and M. After Magos learns about a folktale in which a dead girl’s heart grows into a young man, she sequesters herself in her mother’s house and feeds the lung pork and beef. She doesn’t clean or air out the room. Instead, she uses her odor as a shield, to keep her loved ones away from the lung, to protect its growth. This moment captures the overwhelming nature of Magos’ grief, but it also foreshadows the extent to which she will go to protect what she has left of Santiago.
The second section belongs to Lena, Magos and Joseph’s closest friend, who has been in love with Magos for a long time. A physician in Mexico City, Lena cannot help but be pulled into the web of care around the lung, after it grows fur and a limb-like tail and becomes Monstrilio. When Magos summons Joseph to Mexico City and Joseph inevitably adores Monstrilio, the three take turns caring for the little monster, keeping his existence secret. The love this family builds around Monstrilio is neither neat nor simple. Because despite what Magos wants, and what Joseph hopes, Monstrilio is not human. Still, they continue to love and protect him. They do not have to understand him to fight for him.
Monstrilio the novel, like its protagonist, moves through Mexico City, Berlin, and New York City. Monstrilio, or M, as he prefers when he begins to resemble a human, holds his family together. Even as their grief drives Joseph and Mago apart, and Lena’s loneliness pulls her away from Magos and her family, M’s existence is enough to bring his loved ones together. He is at once an embodiment of their yearslong grief, and his own person. The novel’s closing section, told from M’s perspective, imbues M with agency and chronicles the choices he makes — despite his parents’ desires — to determine his future.
Back in Berlin, the audience witnessing Magos’ performance does not have the full story, and so their tears become reactionary, voyeuristic. But unlike this audience, we, as readers, know the full story. And as Sámano Córdova invites us into this intimate family drama, he offers us something Magos denies her audience: An opportunity to open our hearts and recognize our own griefs, however grotesque and unseemly they might be. What is more human than this?
Elinam Agbo earned an M.F.A. from the University of Michigan's Helen Zell Writers' Program. Born in Ghana, she grew up in the U.S. Midwest.
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