In one of the novel’s more harrowing scenes, a woman’s tattoo comes to life, and “beaks attached to dark feathered heads, slick with blood and bright black eyes,” poke out of her chest as black birds erupt from her collarbone. The book’s main characters are connected by nightmarish hallucinations, and while Beukes’ supernatural touch is a refreshing addition to the crime fiction genre, the source of these phantasms is somewhat opaque and mildly frustrating, though beautifully drawn and full of doom.

These two have found the perfect complement in each other.

Like a more extreme version of Jonno, the killer craves the limelight with little regard for its costs and sees himself as an artist without an audience. The “Monster” himself is plagued by a schizophrenic and supernatural “dream” that propels him to create ghastly monstrosities to achieve artistic fame, or in this case, infamy. Jonno entangles himself in tracking the city’s serial killer while cataloging Detroit’s “ghost city” and its artist gentrifiers. In Jonno, Beukes has created a character both out of touch and realistic, bearing a resemblance to any number of reporters who hop in and out of cities trying to break the most context-less sensationalist stories. He navigates through abandoned factories and squats to highlight Detroit’s poor and dejected in a quest to find the city’s most startling ruin porn. Jonno Haim, a thirtysomething failed writer from New York, has parachuted into Detroit as a citizen journalist to tell the “real” untold story of the city’s blight. To get the public interested in the boy’s death, “because if it’s not a little blonde white girl, you need a human interest angle,” the police craft a narrative to the press about Daveyton being emblematic of “Detroit’s plucky survivor spirit,” now snuffed out. Barnum gaff.īeukes raises uncomfortable questions about race and class at every turn. The result is a kind of mutilated, mythological P.T. It opens with Versado investigating the murder of a young black boy, Daveyton Lafonte, whose torso has been fused with a fawn’s lower half. Gabrielle Versado over the course of 10 days as she tries to catch a serial killer dubbed the Detroit Monster.

Zoo city by lauren beukes