A 400+ page Victorian Goosebumps.

Here are my two favorite bits:
p. 105: "Creatures not of this Earth but from the very Bowels of Hell. I thought of the thing hanging on a hook in the room over which I stood, of the pale, muscular arm bursting through the loose soil of Eliza Bunton's grave, of the sickening squish of its paw puncturing the leg of the old man, of the mass of sickly white flesh and glittering black eyes and drooling mouths laced with row upon row of triangular teeth glittering in the glow of the April stars, of huge, hulking, headless monstrosities issuing from every shadow, leaping and bounding with enormous strides, of Eliza Bunton's corpse being ripped limb from limb and her head stuffed into the mouth of a creature that any rational man would indeed deem from hell."

p. 139-141: "'Children, mostly. Twelve- or thirteen-year-old girls. Girls in the prime of their budding womanhood. Sometimes infants, though, squealing babes hurled naked into the hole. For in the center of the temple is a pit connected by a tunnel to the holding chamber. Into the pit the priests throw her; I have seen this, Warthrop; I have seen it! Cast down twenty feet to the bottom, whereupon she hurls herself against the smooth sides of the sacrificial abyss, scratching and clawing for a handhold, but of course there is none. There is no escape! The head priest gives the signal; the great wooden door rolls up; and they come. You smell it first, a rotten stench like death's decay, then the loud huffing and sharp clicks of their fangs snapping, as the doomed innocent erupts into frenzied screams, crying to her insensible judges above to have mercy. Mercy, Warthrop! They star down at her with faces set in stone, and, as the beasts burst into the pit, her terror robs her of her last shred of dignity: Her bladder empties; her bowels let go. She collapses into the dirt, covered in her own filth, as they descend upon her in a mad rush, the bigger brutes leaping thirty feet from the tunnel's mouth to where she lays, the sacrificial lamb beneath those pagan lords whose mad whimsy condemned her to a fate unfit for even the most egregious malefactor. But their bloodthirsty gods demand; and so they supply.
'The head is the most coveted prize. The first to reach her seizes it and wrenches it from her neck, and her still-beating heart fleshes her blood through that makeshift orifice; a steaming geyser shoots into the air and paints crimson their alabaster bodies. They snarl and snap for a piece of the meat, for meat she be now; human she is no longer. Shredded bits of her are flung far over the rim of the pit, spattering the spectators with the bloody remnants of her maidenly form...'"

Cool, huh? So, the reason why I only give The Monstrumologist three stars is because it feels sometimes that the rest of the book is simply a vehicle for Yancey to fit in these bloody vignettes. There is a lot of gore and a lot of action, but I felt strangely detached from the characters and the gruesome situations they found themselves in. I didn't get much of a sense of who the narrator was, and there was potential for the monstrumologist himself, Pellinore Warthrop, to be a fantastic character (though his characterization felt very much like Sherlock Holmes... and there is certainly a lot of potential to read between the lines for slash, actually), but it all felt generally superficial. It is a very entertaining novel with some really nice gleefully-written gory scenes but not much more than that. Also, the book can very well stand alone as a single novel, but I am curious enough to read the sequel.