Tag Archives: Adult Fiction

The Monkey King

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Do you ever revisit characters or series from your childhood, rewatching them or taking in new adaptations of them as they’re released? Besides that apparently being a sign that I might be anxious, I’m always a bit surprised by the hit of nostalgia when I do encounter certain things I grew up with*, like Sun Wu-Kong from Journey to the West. I remember watching the Hong Kong adaptation as a child, though I don’t actually remember it all that well, so when I saw Girl Giant and the Monkey King on the shelves this year, I knew I had to read it.

Eleven-year old Thom has been having a bit of a rough start to her new life in Georgia, between being one of two Asian kids at the otherwise all-white school and getting bullied by a few girls in her grade (which posse the other Asian girl belongs to), but that’s not even all: she also happens to have superhuman strength that she hasn’t quite gotten the grasp of controlling. As in, she fractured someone’s ribs when she kicked a soccer ball and the goalie tried to block it kind of superhuman strength. Aaaand she might have accidentally freed the Monkey King from the legends when she and her mom visited a temple. Her mom absolutely refuses to acknowledge her developing supernatural strength (ignoring the car door handle Thom accidentally wrenched off, the cup she squeezed too hard…) and avoids any and all attempts to talk about Thom’s father, who’s not in the picture, so despite his penchant for mischief, the Monkey King, Sun Wu-Kong, quickly worms his way into her life as her only true friend and ally, listening to her and helping her accept and control her incredible strength. But is the Monkey King really her friend, or is he just using Thom for his own plans?

You don’t need to know anything about the legend of the Monkey King to read Girl Giant and the Monkey King, as Hoang weaves the mythology in seamlessly. You don’t need to know the gods, goddesses, and heroes of Heaven in order to see the parallel between their snotty bubble and that of Thom’s middle school, and Sun Wu-Kong’s character is fleshed out well, allowing for the shades of grey that define him neither as a good guy or a bad guy, but a complex character that may be looking out for himself in ways, but is not immune to friendship and loyalty. For anyone who read this in record time as I did, look out for the sequel, Girl Giant and the Jade War, by Van Hoang, which is on order now!

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The Secret History of Bennington College

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In May of 2019, journalist Lili Anolik published a doozy of an article in Esquire chronicling “The Secret Oral History of Bennington: The 1980’s Most Decadent College”. This past September, Anolik turned that juicy piece into a season-long podcast called Once Upon a Time…at Bennington College, utilizing her previous research to explore themes of talent, fame, privilege, and excess more deeply. The piece and the podcast concern Gen-X literary stars like Bret Easton Ellis, Donna Tartt, and Jonathan Lethem, the Bennington class of 1986 who would go on to shape the face of literature in the 1980s and 90s. To recap: Ellis scandalized with Less Than Zero and American Psycho, two works so vulgar and soulless (on purpose) that they sent older generations into a tizzy with concern for “the youth”. Tartt’s debut novel The Secret History was immediately dubbed a classic shortly after its release (and is a current TikTok sensation). Lethem gained fame with his National Book Award winning Motherless Brooklyn, which captivated Hollywood actor Edward Norton so thoroughly that he held the film rights for 20 years, finally releasing an adaptation in 2019.  

But more than that, the podcast is about the glittery mystique of literary circles that flourished in the pre-social media age. This was a time when culturally resonant authors were treated like celebrities, scoring invites to the MTV Video Music Awards, for some reason. Reminiscing about Ellis’s launch into stardom as an enfant terrible, Bennington alumni recall the author’s glitzy college graduation party, which was attended by Andy Warhol (Jean-Michel Basquiat would make appearances at later parties as well). While all this glamorous success took place in New York, Bennington College, a small liberal arts school in Vermont, is key to these authors’ works, and is memorialized by its most (in)famous students. In Ellis’s The Rules of Attraction, the school is dressed up as “Camden College”, home to a host of despicable, ultra 80s characters. The Bennington of Donna Tartt’s world (this time called Hampden College) is one of old world Romance (capital R), a Brideshead-esque place of philosophy, decaying decadence, and not-so-secret drinking problems (the two might occupy the same universe: Ellis’s work mentions a group of students who “dress like undertakers”; presumably the Classics group in Tartt’s novel). 

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My Heart is a Chainsaw and the Comfort of Slashers

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The words “comfort” and “slasher” might not seem to go together—in fact, you might see them as diametrically opposed. After all, what’s comforting about a masked man jumping out of your closet brandishing a knife, or a strange voice on the phone asking if you like scary movies? But in Stephen Graham Jones’ new novel My Heart is a Chainsaw, the well-trod roads of the horror genre are just that, a safety net for his traumatized protagonist. As mysterious—but ominously familiar—events start popping up around the gentrifying town of Proofrock, Jade Daniels uses her encyclopedic knowledge of horror conventions to investigate the goings-on. 

Horror isn’t for everyone, but those who love it, love it. I used to know someone who watched horror movies before bed, the way I might watch an episode of Friends or New Girl (this person also worked in a funeral home, so make of that what you will). In My Heart is a Chainsaw, Jade is singularly obsessed with slasher films, knows them inside out, her stream-of-consciousness-like narration a running encyclopedia of the genre (this Letterboxd list compiles Jade’s film references, all 171 of them). She knows her Final Girls, from Laurie Strode to Nancy Thompson to Sidney Prescott; those “good girls” who follow the rules of surviving a horror movie while their less virtuous friends get offed. Jade herself is something of a Final Girl, but she exists on the fringes of society: an Indigenous teenager with an abusive father and absent mother, who barely scrapes through school and has multiple suicide attempts under her belt. Since the Final Girl rules were cemented by Halloween in 1978, filmmakers have played with them, subverted them, modernized them—but Jade, devotee of the classics, doesn’t even consider that she might have Final Girl potential until she’s all but run out of options.  

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