Literacy 2025: Book 17: My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (Volume One)

Book
My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Volume One by Emil Ferris

Synopsis
This is the spiral-bound notebook of Karen Reyes, a 10-year-old living in a basement apartment in Chicago with her mother and older brother. She loves monster movies and horror comics, and she wishes that she’ll be bitten by an undead creature to transform her into the werewolf girl that she knows she truly is. When her troubled upstairs neighbor is killed by a gunshot, she puts on her brother’s trenchcoat and hat and becomes a noir detective on a mission to solve the case.

Notes
For years I’ve been hearing this book described as “astonishing,” “dazzling,” “beautiful,” and “profound.” All the superlatives are accurate. It’s absolutely stunning in how it combines images and words in ways that can only exist in a graphic novel, to the degree that neither seems to be a complement for the other; they inextricably linked with each other.

It also tackles some of the heaviest of heavy topics — the Holocaust, racism, homophobia, cruelty, isolation, poverty, murder, grief, guilt — in a way that doesn’t rob them of their weight and impact, but also aren’t too heavy that you want to look away or become overwhelmed. It’s all processed through the mind of a girl who’s extremely intelligent, but has a specific frame of reference (or lack thereof) for everything, so there’s a sense of fascination to it all.

And the art is stunning throughout. Karen copies the covers of her favorite horror comics (they form the chapter breaks), and she loves going to the Art Institute with her older brother and copying some of her favorite paintings. She has synesthesia, and many of the paintings have smells that trigger strong memories for her. Her drawings are mostly done in pencil with cross-hatched shading, often with colored pencil, and sometimes in ink when she’s recounting particularly traumatic events.

Volume One ends on something of a cliffhanger, and Volume Two was just released last year after a seven year delay. I’m eager to see how the story ends, but I think it’ll be a while before I tackle it. As amazing as My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is, it’s felt like a dark cloud of sadness hanging over everything.

Verdict
Undeniably a masterpiece, a look at the dark cruelty of the world and the bright moments of kindness, all interpreted by an unusually imaginative child.