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Synopsis:

For fans of Ariana Harwicz’s Die, My Love and Ashley Audrain’s The Push, a psychological horror novel that follows a woman obsessed with death who must decide if she’s fit to bring new life into this world—especially after someone she’s fantasized about killing turns up dead. 

Southern suburban housewife Lia and her husband Evan have long dreamed of becoming parents—but when a pregnancy test shows positive, Lia questions whether she wants the child and keeps her pregnancy a secret.

As she’s holding new life inside, she intentionally surrounds herself with death by blackmailing her way into a job at a forensic anthropology center endearingly called The Body Farm. At The Farm, monsters emerge from within Lia—the desire to kill—and she begins daydreaming about murder. Because fantasizing never hurt anyone. Or so she thinks.

Then a body donation to The Farm turns out to be someone she’s imagined killing, and reality and fantasy begin to blur. As people around her begin to die, Lia loses trust in her loved ones and herself . . . and ultimately must put her monsters to bed.

Review:

The debut domestic horror novel by Suzanne Junered, Goodnight Monsters, starts with the narrator, Lia, finding out that she is pregnant after years of trying. Her husband Evan spends most of the week out of state on business, and she has a great deal of time to spend in an otherwise empty house, having lunches and evenings walks with her friends, and thinking about how her life is going to change. She does not know if she wants the baby so she keeps the pregnancy a secret, only tracking how much time she has to decide whether or not she will keep or terminate the baby. In this time, she becomes obsessed with death, to the point where she gets a job at the Body Farm, a real center at the University of Tennessee that does forensic research on the different ways dead bodies decompose under various conditions. As the novel progresses, the story and Lia’s reality gets weirder and weirder, to the point where Lia starts to have issues differentiating between what is real and what is fantasy.

This is a good setup and the execution is okay. I do not care for Lia in the same way that I do not care for any of these characters. They are all self-absorbed and all want to have secret lives. Maybe it is the boredom of living in a upper class neighborhood on the river, but Lia and all of her girl friends talk about is kids and having affairs, and this infidelity seems like a group effort, that everyone should be having one. When Lia meets another researcher at the Body Farm, Robbie, she does not hesitate to start sleeping with him because of course, her husband must be having one as well because he is out of town so much for work. Her husband Evan’s dream is to have a child with her but he is also such a selfish person that having a child would be a horrible idea. Immediately he does not like Lia’s job because she is not paying as much attention to him and is not doing all of the things he expects like the the dishes and laundry. He tells her quit within the first week, and it really shows that this couple does not need a child, because Lia is not convinced she wants more responsibility when Evan already acts like one. There is not a single character in this novel that is a good person, except for maybe the police officer, which is also farfetched. Dan, the police officer who comes by early to do a wellness check on Lia, called by her mother, immediately become friends with Lia. It might be because police officers historically have a soft spot for believing white women when they are obviously lying to them or maybe it is because Dan thinks he has a chance to spend time with a woman whose husband is out of town most of the time. In the end, Dan does not do his job whatsoever. Instead he is portrayed as a “good cop”, someone who understands the situation and makes exceptions for personal issues instead of the law that he is sworn to uphold. No police officer, especially one who has not been an officer for very long, is this trustworthy and understanding.

Besides the fact that most of the characters are either awful people or not believable, the story of Goodnight Monsters is a page-turner, and there are many moments when there is an undercurrent of weirdness that I can appreciate. Overall I enjoyed the story despite the characters, but in fairness the characters are written well enough that I understand why I dislike them. For this I can appreciate this as a novel that is definitely entertaining.

I received this as an ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.