Summary: A Monster Calls

The GIST

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness is a short, illustrated fantasy novel for young readers about a boy, his very sick mother, and the enormous creature that turns up outside his bedroom window at seven minutes past midnight. Published by Walker Books in 2011 and set in present-day England, it began as the idea of another writer, Siobhan Dowd, who conceived it while she had cancer and died in 2007 before she could write it. Her editor asked Ness to take it on. He agreed only on condition that he could let the story go wherever it needed to, which, he has said, is exactly what Dowd would have done herself. He was not trying to guess what she might have written. He was following the process she would have followed, setting the story free to grow and change, and he has described the writing as feeling like a private conversation between the two of them.

The result, with stark black-and-white artwork by Jim Kay, became a landmark. Kay won the commission with a single picture made over one weekend, the monster leaning against the house, and writer and illustrator did not meet until after the book was published. Ness won the Carnegie Medal and Kay the Kate Greenaway Medal in 2012, the only time one book has taken both of Britain's top children's book prizes. It also won the British Children's Book of the Year and the Red House Children's Book Award, the latter voted for by children themselves, and it has since become a 2016 film, with a screenplay by Ness, and a 2018 stage production. It matters because it tells young people, and the adults reading over their shoulders, the truth about what it feels like to watch someone you love be ill, including the feelings nobody likes to admit to.

The Story

Conor O'Malley is thirteen, and he has been waking from the same nightmare for months, "the one with the darkness and the wind and the screaming." He has told no one about it: not his mother, not his grandmother, not his father, not anyone at school. He will barely let himself think about it, and the book keeps its contents from the reader just as Conor keeps them from himself.

One night, just after he surfaces from the dream, he hears his name whispered through the open window. His room looks out on an old church and its graveyard, and in the middle of the graveyard stands a yew tree. He knows what kind of tree it is only because his mother has lately taken to gazing at it from the kitchen window and remarking on it. Yews are the trees of English churchyards, steeped in folklore, poisonous in some of their parts and healing in others. A cloud crosses the moon. When the light returns, the yew is standing in his back garden, its branches twisted into a huge and terrible face, its trunk a spine and torso. It leans down, shakes the walls of the house, plucks Conor out through the window and roars that it has come to get him.

Conor is not frightened. This is not the monster he was expecting; the one he dreads is the one in the nightmare. The creature is baffled by a boy who tells it to come and get him, and promises that he will be afraid "before the end." It is ancient, it says, and has gone by many names; it presents itself as a form of the Green Man of legend. And it insists that Conor called it. It lays out a bargain. On the nights to come it will tell him three true stories. When they are done, Conor will tell a fourth: the truth about his nightmare. In the morning there are yew leaves on his bedroom floor, the only sign that it was more than a dream.

By day, Conor's life is closing in. His mother, Lizzie, is in treatment for an illness that has lasted a year, and the latest round is not going well, whatever she says. She stays determinedly cheerful, and her brightness sometimes makes Conor furious, because it feels like being lied to. He has become a carer as much as a child. His father left years ago and now has a new wife and baby in America, and that new family serves as his reason for keeping his distance when Conor needs him most. His grandmother, independent, strict and seemingly cold, arrives to take charge, and the two of them rub each other raw.

School is no refuge. Lily, his friend since they were babies, told a few people about his mum, and now everyone knows. Classmates do not know what to say, so they say nothing. Conor has not forgiven Lily, though she keeps standing up for him. The only person who looks straight at him is Harry, the school bully, who trips him, hits him and needles him.

At 12:07 the monster returns with its first tale. Long ago an old king married a young woman rumoured to be a witch, then died, leaving her to rule until his grandson came of age. She ruled well and fairly, but she wished to keep the throne, and schemed to marry the young prince to do it. The prince fled with the girl he loved, slept beneath a yew tree, and woke to find her murdered. He roused the people against the queen, and they dragged her to the stake. Conor, who has cast his own grandmother as the witch, waits for her to get what she deserves. But the monster's stories do not behave. The tale turns over, and the monster tells the bewildered boy: "There is not always a good guy. Nor is there always a bad guy. Most people are somewhere in between."

Then his mother is taken into hospital, and Conor has to move into his grandmother's house. There the monster tells the second story, of a sour, greedy apothecary who wants the yew in the churchyard for his medicines and the parson who refuses him and preaches against him, until sickness reaches the parson's own daughters and he comes begging. The apothecary is a nasty piece of work, and the parson is a respected man of faith. Once again the punishment falls where Conor least expects, because the tale turns out to be about a man whose beliefs last only as long as they are convenient. The monster invites Conor to join in tearing the parson's house down, and he does, with wild relief. When the vision clears he is standing alone in the wreckage of his grandmother's sitting room, with her treasured things smashed beyond repair around him. Was it the monster's hands that did it, or his own? The book never quite lets us be sure.

His mother grows weaker, and Conor stops raising his hand in class and stops speaking, and realises that days have passed without anyone at school addressing a word to him. The third story comes at 12:07 in the middle of the day, in the school dining hall, and it is brief: a man was invisible because no one ever saw him, and he called on a monster to make them look. Conor believes he is watching the monster at work. His teachers tell him afterwards that everyone in the hall saw him do it. What happens to Harry in those minutes puts him in hospital and makes sure no one will overlook Conor again. Now his schoolmates are afraid of him, all but Lily, who reaches out to say that she sees him and misses him. He learns that there are harder things than being unseen.

Conor has believed all along that he knows why the monster walks: it has come to help his mother. When the doctors tell the family there is nothing more they can do, his hope turns to fury, and he turns that fury on the monster. But three stories have now been told, and the monster's price is still owed: the fourth tale, the nightmare, and the thing in it that Conor would rather be swallowed whole than say out loud.

What It's Really About

This is a book about anticipatory grief, the long ache of losing someone who is still here, and about the tangle of feelings that comes with it: love, terror, rage, exhaustion and guilt, all at once and all true. Conor is not short of sympathy. What he lacks is permission to feel what he actually feels, and the monster, far from comforting him, pushes him toward honesty.

It is also a book about stories. Conor wants tales with heroes, villains and tidy lessons, and the monster refuses to supply them. Its parables insist that people are contradictory, that belief matters, and that human beings will tell themselves comforting lies and believe them. A story, the book suggests, can be a way of understanding people and feelings even when it carries no clear moral. Alongside runs a portrait of isolation: how suffering can make a child invisible, how kindness that tiptoes can feel like abandonment, and how much it means when one friend says, simply, I see you. There is a thread about family and growing up as well. Conor has had to become an adult at thirteen, which is why a walking tree cannot scare him, and he slowly learns that the grandmother he took for cold is doing her best for her daughter and her grandson in an impossible situation. Because everything is told from Conor's point of view, the reader is never quite sure whether the monster is real or a shape his own mind has made, and the book is richer for leaving that open. The repeated hour of 12:07 does similar work, teaching the reader that this time matters long before the story says why.

Readers love it because it never talks down and never flinches. The novelist Philip Pullman praised it as compelling, powerful and impressive, Publishers Weekly called it a masterpiece, and other reviewers called it brave and beautiful. Kay's inks, bleak and frightening and yet oddly at home among garden sheds and schoolyards, are part of the spell. Those who have lived through a parent's illness say it simply feels true.

Who Should Read It

Read it if you want a short, beautiful book that will break your heart and leave it a little mended. It is written for readers of about twelve and up, but it speaks just as directly to adults, especially anyone who has cared for a dying parent or is helping a young person through loss. If illness in the family is close and raw for you right now, go gently.