Fifteen years ago, seven teenagers walked into the woods outside Rapture, Maine, for a party in a borrowed barn. Six of them are in the town cemetery. The seventh paints for a living under a name that is not hers, three states away, and has spent half her life being the answer everybody had already agreed on. I Am the Monster Under the Bed by Emily Zinnikas opens the week that arrangement falls apart: a journalist arrives on her porch with a camera she has not consented to, the footage travels, and a celebrity psychic decides the case now belongs to him. It is a first novel, heavy on weather and dread, and much angrier than the cover suggests.
How I Am the Monster Under the Bed Is Built
Three books are stacked on top of each other here, and the stacking order is the point.
The bottom layer is a cold case. Willa Renfri Greene was sixteen, she went to a party, she came back to find her friends dead, and the police chief gave her name to the press before anyone had thought to protect a minor. No charges, no answers, no retraction. The middle layer is a portrait of what that does to a person over fifteen years, and it is the part Zinnikas cares about most.
The top layer is the strange one. Willa has always been able to see things. There is something under her bed she has known since childhood, there are figures standing in her parents’ basement with their faces to the wall, and there is a presence in the forest that she has been feeding since she was small. She does not present any of this as a mystery for the reader to solve. She reports it the way you would report a leaking gutter.
That is the structural gamble of I Am the Monster Under the Bed by Emily Zinnikas, and it mostly pays. The suspense is not whether the supernatural is real. It is whether the ordinary half of her account will ever be believed by anyone.
The Town That Picked Its Villain First
Rapture is the furnace of I Am the Monster Under the Bed by Emily Zinnikas, and it burns hot.
At sixteen Willa was groomed by Graham Warren, her PE teacher and soccer coach. He served six months of community service. She served the rest. The town decided, with the speed of a reflex, that a pretty young man with a good handshake had been ruined by a girl, and by the time six of her classmates were killed she had already been established locally as the sort of person things like that happen around.
Zinnikas is excellent on the texture of this. Not the loud hostility, though there is plenty of it, including a cemetery scene that is hard to read. The smaller stuff cuts deeper: the grocery cashier who will not put change in her hand, the neighbour who asks after her mother in a tone that means something else, the way contempt works best when it never says anything actionable out loud. The novel understands that a town does not need evidence to convict. It only needs a story it prefers.
What I Am the Monster Under the Bed Does With the Woods
The horror in I Am the Monster Under the Bed by Emily Zinnikas is the restrained half, which is not what I expected.
Rapture has rules, and every local knows them without ever being taught. Stay out of the woods. If you hear whistling, turn back. Do not whistle in reply. Willa leaves meat at the treeline, behind an embankment of rock, and has done so for so long that it has stopped feeling like a ritual and started feeling like taking the bins out.
For most of its length the forest stays offstage. It groans, it rattles, it snaps a branch. It gets a genuine set piece near the end that is worth the wait, and Zinnikas is smart enough to keep the thing mostly obscured and mostly implied. Readers who came from the folk horror shelf will recognise the grammar at once, though this is a distinctly American version of it.
What Emily Zinnikas Gets Right
- The basement. People-shaped figures under long black veils, standing along the walls with their noses to the concrete like children sent to time out, never moving while you are looking. It is the best sustained image in the novel and it is deployed with real patience.
- The voice. Willa narrates dry, profane and frequently very funny, and her humour is clearly load-bearing. Watching her make a joke while quietly counting how many shapes have moved is the reading experience in miniature.
- Joyce. The journalist who ambushes her in chapter two becomes something considerably more interesting, and Zinnikas never sands off the fact that she caused real harm to get her story.
- The refusal to sentimentalise. I Am the Monster Under the Bed by Emily Zinnikas never makes Willa a brave survivor being healed by a small town. She is a stalker with a good reason, and the book lets her be unpleasant about it.
Where I Am the Monster Under the Bed Gives Ground
Four things hold it back from the top shelf.
- The middle wanders. There is a long stretch of surveillance and small-town errands where the plot waits for a chess piece rather than moving.
- The antagonist is drawn very broad. The celebrity psychic is funny, loathsome and about two degrees from cartoon. The book needs him unravelling, and it gets there by simply turning the dial rather than earning the turn.
- Callum is underfed. The decent transplant cop exists to be decent, and the slow-burn romance is more promise than payoff.
- The last act explains fast. Once the floor gives way, a lot of information arrives in a short space, and a debut’s seams show in the joinery.
Against that, the final fifty pages of I Am the Monster Under the Bed by Emily Zinnikas contain a swerve I did not see coming and would not spoil for anything, and the last page is a small, beautifully placed act of cruelty.
Content Notes and Heat Level
I Am the Monster Under the Bed by Emily Zinnikas is a hard book in places. On the page or closely recounted: the grooming and sexual abuse of a sixteen-year-old by a teacher, a graphic account of the killing of six teenagers, gun violence with on-page deaths, captivity, home invasion and stalking, mob harassment, terminal illness, animal remains and raw meat handled at length. There is no sex. The romantic thread is a slow burn with one near miss, and the heat level is effectively zero.
Read These Next
Five for readers who finish I Am the Monster Under the Bed by Emily Zinnikas and want more of the same weather:
- Listen for the Lie by Amy Tintera. A woman the internet convicted, a podcast that drags her home, and the same queasy comedy about true crime as an industry.
- The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix. For the survivor-as-product argument, taken to its furthest point.
- The Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig. Teenagers, a forest that keeps one of them, and adults who never stopped paying for it.
- They Say a Girl Died Here by Sarah Pinborough. A small place, a dead girl and a rumour mill doing the work of a jury.
- Gothictown by Emily Carpenter. If the appetite of the place is the part that gripped you.
Worth Your Shelf
The image I keep returning to is not the barn, or the basement, or the antlers. It is a woman in a dark kitchen at twenty to three in the morning, cutting meat on a board with the lights off, carrying a bowl down the back steps and setting it behind a rock at the edge of the trees. She steps back into her own bootprints on the way home, just for the fun of it.
That is the whole novel in one errand. I Am the Monster Under the Bed by Emily Zinnikas is a book about what a person becomes when a town spends fifteen years telling her what she is, and about the fact that she may eventually agree. Emily Zinnikas has written a debut with a real voice, a first-rate central image and a villain she has not quite earned, and the good parts are good enough that the weak ones only mildly slow it down. Read it in winter. Keep the hall light on.
