My Favorite Thing Is Monsters

The story begins with a dream. Karen Reyes (10 years old), the protagonist, is having a recurring dream of becoming a werewolf. She transforms into a hairy creature with long legs, big teeth, and begins howling. People around the city hear her and begin calling for her to be killed. The werewolf version of Karen is her alter ego. She also has a love of monsters which inspires her to see herself in this way. In her dream, Karen is about to be shot, and in this moment, she ponders the nature of humanity: “humans are afraid of death, and it makes them frantic” (15). The people who call for her murder are grim and angry looking, with caricaturized faces that are prominent on the pages. Karen describes people as the “M.O.B. …. Mean, Ordinary, and Boring” (17). She feels this way because people only believe things that they can tangibly sense, and Karen is an avid believer that monsters exist, just out of plain sight. Then, she awakes to the sound of her mother’s voice. She checks her nightie for blood and finds none, grabs her stuffed monster Blemmy, and begins copying art from a copy of Ghastly, a horror magazine that her brother Deeze supplies her with.

Karen is comforted by her mother, who she describes as “half Irish Appalachia and part American Indian from…who knows where” (17). Her mother’s eyes are gray, with one green patch in the left eye which Karen calls “Green Island” (17). She is shown on a splash page wading out into her mother’s eye as she goes to lay under the pine trees there. On February 14, 1968, Karen’s neighbor Mrs. Anka Silverberg is found dead and neatly tucked into her bed, with both house doors bolted from the outside. Her husband has an alibi, and the death is ruled a suicide. Karen hears this from her mother when they go to the diner together and are later joined by Karen’s brother, Deeze. Their father is Mexican, and Karen explains that Deeze often hears racist remarks due to his Hispanic looks. She overhears her mother telling Deeze that Anka’s cat was found locked in a closet, and the gun that she supposedly shot herself with was nowhere to be seen. She was shot in the living room but found in bed. None of the facts add up. Because the Reyes family is Catholic, Karen’s mother believes that it is a sign from God. Karen remembers Anka as a slightly off-center, but kind and “sort of magic” (40) person.

Karen believes that Anka did not end her own life and begins to investigate the mysterious death. Although the nuns at her school tell her that having an interest in crime or monsters is a sin, her brother reassures her. She starts by drawing a picture of Anka: a woman with a bluish face (because she was often sad), big eyes, and a cat on her lap. Karen visits Anka on her way to school every morning, and Anka gives her a lump of rye bread which Karen then feeds to birds. Today, Anka seemed distant and like she had something shadowy over her, like the Magdalene holding the skull painting. Karen reveals that she has synesthesia, and when she sees the painting in her mind, she begins smelling a basement and the “secrets of bones and other buried things” (22). Karen believes the painting holds a clue. She reveals that the paintings at the museum are better friends to her than the kids at school, who bully and ostracize her. Her teacher is the same way, berating her for making Valentine’s cards that were too gory. Karen reminisces about seeing The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli painting at the art museum with her brother, and believes it too holds a clue about Anka. Within the painting, a woman is shown lying on the bed in a sexual position while a demon sits on her stomach, staring off in thought. Karen feels, like the woman in the painting, Anka was tortured by something from her past.