“Monsters takes the form of an extraordinary wunderkammer filled with narraticules…about what can’t stay, what was probably never there to begin with, and the beauty of that, and the biting loss.”
Lance Olsen, author of Theories of Forgetting

“Karen Brennan evokes here a fairy tale world that is just like this world, only sadder and stranger.”
Kate Bernheimer, author of How a Mother Weaned her Girl from Fairy Tales

“This book is tender, tough, magical and merciless. A wonderful book by a spectacular talent.” Victor LaValle, author of The Ballad of Black Tom

from “Monsters“
…At The Dollar Store, which is going out of business so that everything is now only fifty cents, they purchase a little figurine of a dwarf that looks as if it’s made of mucus and spit. The dwarf has a very wide face and a tiny grimace which reveals just a sliver of tooth. It is so resolutely hideous that they cannot stop themselves from laughing right in the store in front of the sales clerk. Good Lord! says the daughter. When she laughs she gets very red-faced and she clenches her one good fist. She is one of those who wheezes when she laughs and now she is wheezing and wheezing at the ugly figurine. Something to remember me by, says her father, who is also laughing….

Four Way Books