Monstrilio, the genre-bending debut from Mexican writer and artist Gerardo Sámano Córdova, inhabits a world where no one dead is ever truly gone, so long as they’re remembered. Still, Magos — the first of the novel’s four protagonists — has a lofty goal; as Sámano Córdova explains in the prologue, “As best she can, she puts her son back together.”
When her 11-year-old son, Santiago, succumbs to an illness stemming from his single, malformed lung, Magos acts on impulse: she cuts out a piece of the organ, and, loosely following the teachings of an old folk tale, nurtures it until it grows into a sentient creature. The creature, first called “the lung,” then Monstrilio, then just “M,” is not quite human; he soon develops fur, fangs, and a large, clawed arm-tail, and, as he grows, so does an insatiable appetite for flesh. Still, to Magos, Santiago’s father Joseph, and the couple’s best friend Lena — who, alongside the creature himself, make up the novel’s four protagonists — he is as close to a reborn son as they will get. In the safety of their isolated estate outside of Mexico City, this hodgepodge family raises M to be sensitive, kind-hearted, and inquisitive, all things Santiago would have been given the chance to live. In turn, M becomes more and more like Santiago until eventually, his appearance mirrors that of the lost son. Still, his hunger grows.
A striking meditation on loss, grief, and what it means to truly love a child unconditionally, Monstrilio is an unimpeachable highlight in the growing canon of post-COVID magical realism.
M is not a vampire — not exactly — but Sámano Córdova still makes deft use of Monstrilio’s adjacency to the genre, taking notes from classics like Dracula and Carmilla to explore themes of queerness and taboo. (After all, M may occasionally crave human flesh, but as he approaches adulthood, he also finds himself nimble enough at navigating the world of kink to identify willing victims.) The novel also easily situates itself in the tradition of bloodthirsty bildungsromane, alongside novels like Claire Kohda’s Woman, Eating and Camille DeAngelis’ Bones and All in the literary tradition of children learning to live away from their parents and, in the process, coming to terms with their own insatiable bloodlust. (Perhaps for Monstrilio, Carmilla’s experimentation with these themes makes it an especially apt comparison — both novels are as much about the discovery of a monster as they are about an only child living in the shadow of a grieving parent, attempting against the odds to grow up).
However, Monstrilio is also at the forefront of another tradition, that of the post-COVID magical realist novel. The canon’s trademarks are clear: a family living in solitude, their existence marked by grief and some intangible, seemingly supernatural threat; a child who cannot enter the outside world without fracturing this family structure, but who believes there must be more out there, somewhere. More a sub-genre than an entirely new invention, the movement takes inspiration from its forerunners, but is punctuated by this isolation. Its development in the years since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic can perhaps be understood as a recognition of isolation — an element that previously shaped foundational genre texts like Gabriel García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Toni Morrison’s Beloved — as particularly suited for the current epoch. What is more surreal, after all, than the lived experience of a pandemic?
Importantly, isolation is not a source of horror in these novels, a fact even the movement’s more classically horror-tinted entries like Monstrilio maintain. Instead, this solitude — usually imposed by some devastating outside force that is not a pandemic, but curiously like one in effect — is a refuge, a space where unshakable intimacy is cultivated. For their own safety, the family will not, cannot, and often doesn’t want to leave the microcosm of their close-knit structure. In turn, the child, often the nexus of the family’s magic, must be protected from a universe unknown to them. (For novels written in the era of the COVID-19 baby boom, this last detail appears especially vital.) To the child — and often, to the reader — that outside universe and its potentially imminent fiery end have yet to be fully comprehended. This tension makes these novels as much about emerging from isolation, with all the fear and complexities that come with rejoining the outside world, as they are about the surreality of living isolated from it. It’s the classic Rapunzel, with the looming threat of apocalypse never far behind.
Amongst formidable contemporaries in this movement, like Jennifer Neal’s Notes on Her Color, Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share of Night, and Alexis Schaitkin’s Elsewhere, Monstrilio stands out by aligning itself with predecessors as a product not of pure fantasy, but of timeless spirituality and folk. Without ever sacrificing the freshness of Sámano Córdova’s voice, Monstrilio is magical realism for the magical realism classicist. In much the same way as Marquez’s town of Macondo or Morrison’s resurrected Beloved, M is real because, like Santiago before him, his mother willed him to be so.
In this regard, Monstrilio is, quintessentially, a Mexican story; Sámano Córdova’s interactions with death cement it as such. Like the best magical realist novels, the magic in Monstrilio and its cultural origins are intertwined, a characteristic blend of folk tales and religion playing a more prominent role in the novel than the tenets of classic horror. Magos’ ability to raise the dead comes not from some faraway fantasy world, but from folk knowledge passed through generations. M is not a mere replica of Santiago, but a piece of Santiago’s spirit remains within him, kept alive by his family’s memory of their son. In the world of Monstrilio, every day is Día de los Muertos; the dead may inspire grief, but not horror, and memory makes necromancers of us all. (For interested readers, the author’s culturally informed thoughts on death rose again later this year in his essay “On Día de Muertos, the Dead Return To Eat Us.”)
Interestingly, Sámano Córdova doesn’t force meaning onto M’s pseudo-vampirism. It could be a Pet Sematary-esque fable about wishing for too much, a manifestation of Magos’ need to keep alive her all-consuming grief, or simply a result of the fact that M is, after all, a monster; the why and how of his bloodlust are much less important than his family’s reactions. Natural comparisons to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein aside, M is unquestionably born from love; he may be the product of his mother’s desperate experimentation, but she never grows to regret her creation. Instead, Monstrilio follows Magos, its own Victor Frankenstein, as she learns what it means to truly love unconditionally, an act that, given M’s creature-like qualities, she sometimes finds difficult to stomach.
Still, even this remade son cannot last forever. Under his family’s careful guidance, Monstrilio becomes M, progressively more human, shedding his fur, arm-tail, and carnivorous urge, and even growing to look like Santiago. Then, just as quickly, M grows up; his arm-tail begins to reemerge, as does his bloodlust, and he becomes Monstrilio once again. In the novel’s final section, written from Monstrilio’s point of view, he speaks directly to Santiago, perhaps Sámano Córdova affirming to the reader that the two sons are separate entities — except, are they? Santiago and Monstrilio are inextricably bound — to the extent that the latter can even access the former’s memories of his brief life on Earth. Still, the novel rests on the idea that the boys are not, and never will be, entirely one and the same. It is in this ambiguous space where Sámano Córdova does some of his most interesting work, returning to his questions about memory keeping alive the souls of the dead and how that belief may shape our grief, a thought perhaps especially salient in the wake of the pandemic’s surreal collective tragedy. The family’s memories have kept their son alive, but their grief has created an entirely new entity in the process.
True to the novel’s cultural roots, Sámano Córdova ends Monstrilio not by chastising the family for their inability to let the dead die, but — in post-COVID magical realist fashion — with an acknowledgment that their isolation cannot last forever. Monstrilio, the child they’ve raised so carefully in an attempt to cultivate the life Santiago could not live, must inevitably dissolve their insular family structure so he can begin to live just that. It is in this ending where Sámano Córdova once again places Monstrilio, and its thoughts on isolation, death, and grief, at the apex of the sub-genre. The family’s unconditional, sometimes overpowering love, cultivated in quarantine, is not an inhibitor, but a nutrient, one ultimately so strong that it pushes Monstrilio to explore the world outside, in all its fear, monstrosity, and beauty. As best they could, they’ve put their son back together.