Review: Delicious Monsters

Title: Delicious Monsters
Author: Liselle Sambury
Genre: Young Adult, Horror, Thriller, Paranormal
Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books
Source: Publisher
Format: Paperback arc
Release Date: February 28, 2023
Rating: ★★★★

Goodreads Synopsis:

The Haunting of Hill House meets Sadie in this evocative and mind-bending psychological thriller following two teen girls navigating the treacherous past of a mysterious mansion ten years apart.

Daisy sees dead people—something impossible to forget in bustling, ghost-packed Toronto. She usually manages to deal with her unwanted ability, but she’s completely unprepared to be dumped by her boyfriend. So when her mother inherits a secluded mansion in northern Ontario where she spent her childhood summers, Daisy jumps at the chance to escape. But the house is nothing like Daisy expects, and she begins to realize that her experience with the supernatural might be no match for her mother’s secrets, nor what lurks within these walls…

A decade later, Brittney is desperate to get out from under the thumb of her abusive mother, a bestselling author who claims her stay at “Miracle Mansion” allowed her to see the error of her ways. But Brittney knows that’s nothing but a sham. She decides the new season of her popular Haunted web series will uncover what happened to a young Black girl in the mansion ten years prior and finally expose her mother’s lies. But as she gets more wrapped up in the investigation, she’ll have to decide: if she can only bring one story to light, which one matters most—Daisy’s or her own?

As Brittney investigates the mansion in the present, Daisy’s story runs parallel in the past, both timelines propelling the girls to face the most dangerous monsters of all: those that hide in plain sight.

Review:

Seventeen-year-old Daisy can see dead people. She’s constantly surrounded by them in Toronto, but she manages to deal with it. When her mother gets the news that she inherited a mansion in Timmins, a city in Northern Ontario, Daisy and her mother, Grace, move there. In the mansion, Daisy must confront her mother’s secret past. Ten years later, Brittney hosts a web series about haunted places. She decides that she wants to shape the new series around forgotten Black girls, like Daisy. Brittney and her co-host Jayden go to “Miracle Mansion” to investigate the haunted mansion where Daisy’s tragic story unfolds. 

This story started out as a ghost story, but it had a lot more meaning than that. It was quite intense, particularly towards the end. The ending of this story raised the question of what girls are forgotten and who is considered worth looking for. This horror story had an emotionally charged ending. There were extensive trigger warnings at the beginning of the book, which I will include at the end of this post.

One of my criticisms of the story is that I found there was too much back story at the beginning. There was a lot of Daisy’s life in Toronto in the first third of the book, and it wasn’t as crucial to the ending of the book. I would have liked it more if the main story started sooner. There were also many hints to tension points that were obvious by the time they were revealed, which minimized the tension they should have caused. 

Delicious Monsters is a horror story with and important message. 

Content warnings: child sexual assault (off page), child physical abuse (off page), child neglect, grooming, suicide, killing of a goat, body horror, violence, death

Thank you Simon and Schuster for providing a physical copy of this book.

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Have you read Delicious Monsters? What did you think of it?