Why yes, this narrator is very unreliable…as a library employee.

114. The Comfort of Monsters – Willa C. Richards

Sometimes I get mad at blurbs and descriptions that mention all the parts of a book that would appeal to me and then it turns out those parts are actually very minimal and the story is barely structured.

The main character of The Comfort of Monsters being a library employee is so minimal that mostly she’s a thief and a bad employee. Law books, Pegasus? With no law degree? Those are hard to read and I know you had access to a photocopier as an employee, you could have just made relevant copies or read…oh, but you have to actually go to work to have breaks to read on. Ugh. And I honestly can’t picture even a library in 1991 having “erasing notes” as an actual paid student job at a library. It’s more like, shelving would be the job, with occasional erasing notes because nobody has time to notice the notes unless someone left their dang post-its in the book/someone who wants to use the book points them out. Do you know how long it would take to fully page through each book that comes back? I don’t think you do because no one does because no one has time for that. Anyway, the point of this library work rant is that when even a small part of a book doesn’t ring true, it casts a pall over the rest of it. And she barely showed up to her job anyway. Barely showed up and then in the 2019 timeline was fired, I think, it seemed like she was fired. She is an unreliable narrator who does quite a bit of wine drinking and hoarding and thieving law books (so pointless, seriously, just use them in the building).

The real point of this book is to show how nastily crime affects not just the direct victim, or it could be, but I just couldn’t totally tell in the end. The narrator is stuck after her sister disappears; she parallels it with Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims’ families a smidge, except that parallel doesn’t really work because Dahmer’s victims were found. Her brother and her mother’s reactions and journeys from constant trying to find to anger to “just find her so I can be buried next to my child” make sense to that end.

The main character’s obsessions with the case file and her sister’s probably being murdered by that older man Frank she was dating who sucks makes sense, but too much of the the story is how she and her sister are in competition about who is cooler and who has a better dysfunctional relationship with their boyfriend. A competition between a poet with a job at the same chocolate factory Dahmer worked at and a firefighter in training, who both have some interest in violence.

Then her sister is gone and she wants to find her and hoards the case file, but never really takes the time to learn to investigate in all the years between 1991 and 2019. And then nothing is really resolved ever and it muddles a lot. The story muddles a lot in 1991 and it muddles a lot in 2019. Muddles like someone who wants to say something, but doesn’t know what that is. Muddles like an endless hangover. Muddles like literary novels like to muddle in being unsatisfying reads where genre novels don’t see that as an objective.

You know who does not muddle? My pigs Peregrine, Horace, and Ozma; they learned to investigate without even learning to read.