The Monster of Elendhaven

This is an interesting book, but I can't really say I enjoyed it. I thought it was a romance, but it's a horror novella. There's a lot of explicit violence and gore, including people suffering from a plague. Johann is a murderer and delights in killing. If you prefer to look for content warnings, you definitely need to do that for this book. Or if there's something specific you avoid, ask me.

Florian is evil. Imagine the evilest villain you can. I don't mean the fun kind of villain, but someone you actively loathe. For me, I think of Prince Regal in the first Farseer Trilogy and Kai Winn from Deep Space Nine. Now imagine this villain has a henchman who is completely devoted to them, and they have sex. That's pretty much the nature of the pairing between Florian and Johann. It has an element of fated mates, as well, in a way that I found extremely off-putting.

I don't mind gay villains but these two (especially Florian) are written like deviants. Johann says flat out (not a direct quote), “you prefer men because no woman measures up to your sister.” I'm not comfortable with anything about that. It also would've been really easy to make this world queernormative, but instead, they're transgressing with their relationship too, in addition to all their actual crimes.

I did like the dynamic between them because I've never read anything quite like it. Florian doesn't have any soft edges. He is actively cruel to Johann at every turn. Johann is a brute but he loves everything about Florian, including his cruelty. There is no explicit sex, but the love scenes are like twisted games. Very dark and strange.

I also liked the imagery. The crumbling industrial city was very easy for me to see and it felt original, while reminding me of other settings. The streets and interiors felt desolate and decayed. This writer is skilled at establishing mood and at painting a detailed picture.

I think I might've enjoyed the book much more, despite all my distaste, if I had liked the writing style, but I did not. It's overloaded with metaphors. I am kind of pretentious myself and I rarely think that about books, but I did have that feeling here. I wasn't enchanted. But I listened to the audiobook and I liked the narrator, Daniel Henning, who was new to me.

Overall, I only recommend this to people who enjoy horror. I don't like the nature of the relationship, and I don't believe we are at a place as a society where we can conscionably write queer relationships this way without doing harm to the perception of real people's lives.

This was right up my street. Very dark and haunting with a slight m/m bent. Johann grew up on the streets not knowing where he was from or who he was, named on a whim by a drunk sailor who immediately met his end after, but then he sees Florian and is drawn to the dandy in a way he doesn't understand. Murder, magic, plague, all in a very dark, viscerally described setting. I commend the author for getting so much story into so little pages (a mere 103 in my copy) but also left me wanting more.
The only problem I had is the last chapter (with John, similar origins to Johann) was very confusing as it was unclear if this was Johann or a completely new character and it also sounded like Sondenfell was actually London (very Jack the Ripper vibes when describing the murders).

Overall, it was a fun, quick read that's not going to be for everyone.

The Monster of Elendhaven by Jennifer Giesbrecht starts with a dark promise of scintillation and details so sharp and vivid they slice like a knife. For example, “Thin ice isn't a problem for the sea; it's a problem for the blind idiot who steps out on it. The fool who breaks it gets sucked under; the ice, it mends.” The visual is stunning.

An idiot on unforgiving ice falling through, passing into the icy depths as a relentless and ruthless sheet of ice mends the whole. The idiot disappears as if he never existed. It is gorgeous; it is the type of description that sticks with a reader. Sometime in the future, when a reader is next to a frozen lake, the visual of unforgiving ice will come crashing to the forefront of the reader's mind. It will cause them to take a massive step back from the edge.

The Monster of Elendhaven is brutal and full of passages that evoke such dark imagery. If I was to judge the reading experience of Giesbrecht's use of language and imagery, this is one of the most haunting and atmospheric books I have read in a long while. But a story cannot just be extremely quotable passages, and that is where it ultimately went off the rails for me.

The premise is that there is a town, a dark skulking village on the edge of a seashore where everything is poison. “(it) sulks on the edge of the ocean. Wracked by plague, abandoned by the South, stripped of industry and left to die. But not everything dies so easily.” Many things may kill you in this dark victorian-esque town, most notably is “A thing without a name stalks the city, a thing shaped like a man, with a dark heart and long pale fingers yearning to wrap around throats. A monster who cannot die.” This monster is a man named Johann, a man who remembers nothing of his creation. He is a man who cannot die, and he has tried many times. He has thrown himself off buildings, stabbed himself, poisoned... everything. He will not die.

The other character of the book is a man named Florian, who is a different kind of monster. Florian is an accountant by day but something else entirely by night. Johann becomes infatuated with Florian. These two monsters swirl and dance around each other like leaves caught in a tornado. There is gruesome detail, murder most foul, and a love story that left me a little confused and uncomfortable. Johann almost stalks Florian, but Johann is in for a surprise as Florian is no one's prey.

In the end, though, while the visuals and detailing in this book is spectacular, the plotting felt very shaky. It is a story that needs a nudge in a direction. If it is horror, revel in the spectacle of it. If it is a love story, fabulous. These two characters shall enchant me. But being in the middle left me neither scared nor enchanted with the love between the two main characters.