#BlogTour ‘The Comfort Of Monsters’ by Willa C Richards

About the book…

Set in Milwaukee during the “Dahmer summer” of 1991, A remarkable debut novel for fans of Mary Gaitskill and Gillian Flynn about two sisters—one who disappears, and one who is left to pick up the pieces in the aftermath.

In the summer of 1991, a teenage girl named Dee McBride vanished in the city of Milwaukee. Nearly thirty years later, her sister, Peg, is still haunted by her sister’s disappearance. Their mother, on her deathbed, is desperate to find out what happened to Dee so the  family hires a psychic to help find Dee’s body and bring them some semblance of peace.

The appearance of the psychic plunges Peg back to the past, to those final carefree months when she last saw Dee—the summer the Journal Sentinel called “the deadliest . . . in the history of Milwaukee.” Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer’s heinous crimes dominated the headlines and overwhelmed local law enforcement. The disappearance of one girl was easily overlooked.

Peg’s hazy recollections are far from easy for her to interpret, assess, or even keep clear in her mind. And now digging deep into her memory raises doubts and difficult—even terrifying—questions. Was there anything Peg could have done to prevent Dee’s disappearance? Who was really to blame for the family’s loss? How often are our memories altered by the very act of voicing them? And what does it mean to bear witness in a world where even our own stories are inherently suspect?

A heartbreaking page-turner, Willa C. Richards’ debut novel is the story of a broken family looking for answers in the face of the unknown, and asks us to reconsider the power and truth of memory.

My thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things Tours for the blog tour invite, and publishers Point Blank for my gifted review copy of ‘The Comfort Of Monsters’ by Willa C.Richards which is out from 13th January 2022.

*with the biggest of apologies to the publicity team, author and blogtour organiser, I am so sorry this review is 2 days after when I should have posted*

The title of this stunning debut novel refers to the quote relayed at the front of it-

Modernity has eliminated the comfort of monsters because, we have seen, in Nazi Germany and elsewhere, that evil often works as a system,it works through institutions as a banal (meaning ”common to all”) mechanism – Jack Halberstam

By this, I take it to mean that the beasts of old, the ghosts and ghouls which lurked in the shadows, were explained away by daylight, common sense and science. There are no such things as werewolves, vampires and so on. But in the post WW2 world, the awareness that pure evil wears a human face, and looks like your next door neighbour, means comfort can scarcely be found. We have looked deep within that abyss, and seen, in return, our true face.

And this is the case in point here, the 30 year gap between the disappearance of Candace, aka Dee McBride, and the attempt of her sister Peg (nicknamed Pegasus) to lay her to rest for once and for all. The legal limitation of ‘no body, no crime’ has been the response for so many years, yet the reverse is never considered.

Just because a body has not been located, does that mean that no foul play happened in 1991?

Overshadowed by the boogeyman who haunted the Milwaukee of the 1990’s, the unpreposessing , ‘pass right by him in the street’ ordinary every man, Jeffrey Dahmer.

You mention that name and everyone pretty much can contextualise him in some way or another. What cannot reliably be named or contextualised, are his victims who, by their transient and high risk lifestyle-read being gay, homeless, from impoverished backgrounds-kind of asked for it.  That is the subtext of how, basically, the system, the mechanism to which Jack referred earlier, has it its very passivity and neutrality, allowed a culture in which a man could prey on so many young men without being noticed.

As I write, I am keenly aware that this is the very opposite of what Willa is trying to say in her book. I have let Dahmer, Milwaukee’s Cannibal, consume the story she is trying to tell through 30 years of so-called progress in equality . Dee was overlooked because she wasn’t important, there was no sign she killed herself or was murdered, and , frankly, no one cared.

No body, no crime, remember?

The misogynism of the police force is rendered through exquisitely painful scenes such as when Peg rings the police officer who has been ‘overseeing’ Dee’s case since the start and their awkward, at odds conversation is because Peg thinks she can lever the Me Too’ movement to have her sister , finally, returned to her and he, well, he thinks she is ringing to threaten him with it from an entirely separate angle. Because they slept together when she was too young and angry to know better and he isn’t really apologising at all, he is more worried about himself and his job.

Now, nearly thirty years later, a lifetime lived in a limbo of regrets and half truths, memories which become re-written through the passage of time, all are about to resurface.

Peg’s mother does not have much time left, and her dying wish is to be buried with Dee, she is sure that after having the second of two strokes, that she accessed a higher plain and ‘saw’ the shallow, hand dug grave which Dee lies in. She has buried her husband , has bought two plots next to that grave, one for her and one for Dee.

The problem is, she is keen to engage the help of an insta-famous psychic, Thomas Alexander.

The same psychic who has turned up to Milwaukee to try and talk to Dahmer’s ghost.

As the sister of one of Dahmer’s victims explains on the news covering this ‘important’ event-

”Those men, she said,’none of them, none, have ever gotten the respect,in death,they deserve. They’re going to let a serial killer speak from the grave before they’ll let us speak.”

And she is 100% correct, how would you feel if a psychic was charging 100’s of dollars to attend an audience with your relative’s murderer?

Sickened would probably cover it.

Now, now Peg has to , against her brother, Pete’s wishes, organise this man to come and see her mother, to fulfil this dying wish. Her niece, Pete’s daughter Dana, is the voice of wisdom in this situation where she cautions Peg about letting this man into their life. He is extremely famous and there is an expectation that her story, Dee’s story, will become Thomas’ version of Dee’s life. And are they prepared to share that with the world? To lose what little they have remaining in these increasingly fractured memories? Which are becoming like photocopies of photcopies?

But also, don’t they deserve a resolution?

As I was reading this, all that came to mind was the pain of the mum of Keith Bennett.

Each page of this novel, each sentence is rendered so that it fits , neatly and precisely to the sentence and the page which came before it.

The structure is exquisite, the tone and form of the sentences so very precise, it is impossible to drag yourself away once you have started ‘The Comfort Of Monsters’. It is a crime story, a mystery and a social commentary all rolled into one , however, I would also wager it is a work of art. The rage and anger is so carefully restrained but you can feel it pulsing behind the paper as you turn the pages.

How can someone who was so loved, so wanted, just disappear from the world and leave no trace?

And is finding the truth of what happened to her a blessing, or a curse?

I would absolutely recommend this novel to anyone.

About the author…

Willa C. Richards is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she was a Truman Capote Fellow.

Her work has appeared in The Paris Review and she is a recipient of a PEN/Robert J. Dau Prize for Emerging Writers. The Comfort Of Monsters is her first novel.

Links-https://willacrichards.com

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