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May. 5th, 2010 09:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
darchildreSo...about a month ago, I found out about a book and put it on hold. However, because I had too much to read at the time, I suspended the hold so it wouldn't come in for a month. And then I promptly forgot what the book was about and why I had wanted it, until I got it yesterday.
It is called The Monstrumologist and is by Richard Yancey. Now, you are looking at that and thinking, "That is a terrible title". And it pretty much is. Also, it is the kind of title that makes one think that it's kidlit, as indeed I did until about halfway through the first chapter, when things got rather graphically gory and I realized that it was, in fact, a YA novel. Now, I am about 60 or so pages in.
It is about a 12 year old boy who is the assistant to a monstrumologist, named Dr Pellinore Warthrop. Apparently, a monstrumologist is a person who studies and/or hunts monsters. It is a stupid word and I'm a little embarrassed about it on the book's behalf. However! There are anthopophagi, which are pretty cool. I always prefer "real"/folkloric monsters to made-up ones and anthropophagi have the advantages of having a pretty cool design and being unusual. So that's nifty.
Also, Dr Warthrop is awesome. He is so perfectly the ideal of the mad scientist that I find myself imagining him to look like Peter Cushing, even though the book is set in New England. He is so amazingly horrible! I mean, mad scientists are generally bad people, which is part of the reason they're so much fun, but generally the people they mistreat are adults. Having Dr Warthrop's assistant be a 12 year old orphan boy brings his callousness and self-absorption home rather sharply. Possibly, this sort of thing should make me dislike him but honestly, every time Dr Warthrop does something callous and inhuman, I find myself liking him more. I don't read about mad scientists to find people whose company I would enjoy in real life, after all.
So far, the book has contained grave robbing, a gruesome dissection, close-range gunplay, and a chase through a mouldering graveyard, on top of an awesome mad scientist. I'm really hoping that it can keep it up and doesn't fizzle out.
Apparently, there is a sequel due out later this year that, by the title, seems to have a wendigo in it. I will admit that I am intrigued.
It is called The Monstrumologist and is by Richard Yancey. Now, you are looking at that and thinking, "That is a terrible title". And it pretty much is. Also, it is the kind of title that makes one think that it's kidlit, as indeed I did until about halfway through the first chapter, when things got rather graphically gory and I realized that it was, in fact, a YA novel. Now, I am about 60 or so pages in.
It is about a 12 year old boy who is the assistant to a monstrumologist, named Dr Pellinore Warthrop. Apparently, a monstrumologist is a person who studies and/or hunts monsters. It is a stupid word and I'm a little embarrassed about it on the book's behalf. However! There are anthopophagi, which are pretty cool. I always prefer "real"/folkloric monsters to made-up ones and anthropophagi have the advantages of having a pretty cool design and being unusual. So that's nifty.
Also, Dr Warthrop is awesome. He is so perfectly the ideal of the mad scientist that I find myself imagining him to look like Peter Cushing, even though the book is set in New England. He is so amazingly horrible! I mean, mad scientists are generally bad people, which is part of the reason they're so much fun, but generally the people they mistreat are adults. Having Dr Warthrop's assistant be a 12 year old orphan boy brings his callousness and self-absorption home rather sharply. Possibly, this sort of thing should make me dislike him but honestly, every time Dr Warthrop does something callous and inhuman, I find myself liking him more. I don't read about mad scientists to find people whose company I would enjoy in real life, after all.
So far, the book has contained grave robbing, a gruesome dissection, close-range gunplay, and a chase through a mouldering graveyard, on top of an awesome mad scientist. I'm really hoping that it can keep it up and doesn't fizzle out.
Apparently, there is a sequel due out later this year that, by the title, seems to have a wendigo in it. I will admit that I am intrigued.
