Jump to ratings and reviews
Rate this book

American Monster

Rate this book
"- Mommy? Are you there?
- Norma?
- Is everything all right?
- Everything's fine. I just want to go home is all.
- Where are you?
- I already told you.
- Tell me again.
- Outside a pharmacy on the coast. It's almost dawn and I'm barefoot.
- Barefoot?
- I don't know if he's the guy.
- When you find the guy, you can come home.
- I know. It's just, the longer I'm here the more it...
- it hurts?
- And it's just that we dropped I don't know how many pills. Couldn't you just come get me? You can drop me back, okay? I just need a break. I'd like to see
to hold, to touch, to have
to be"


In the beginning, KALI I8 created Norma (a network operation requiring minimal access) with a singular goal: bring back the horn of the perfect male.

Spill City: the coast of a near-future California, newly broken from the continental United States. In a temporary calm between storms, Norma combs the exposed intestines of the human world for the Guy. The Guy, the horn, is the only way home. If home exists. If home ever existed.

The longer Norma stays, the harder it is to remember.

She is a woman, a mother, a harbinger, a vessel, a tool, a program. She can be written and unwritten over and over again until something, someone, sticks.

And people, humans, are starting to stick.

Mommy is not pleased.

332 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2014

Loading interface...
Loading interface...

About the author

J.S. Breukelaar

20 books105 followers
J.S. Breukelaar is the author of the Aurealis Award-nominated novel Aletheia, and American Monster, a Wonderland Award finalist. Collision, her new collection from Meerkat Press, drops in Feb 19. She has stories, essays and poetry published in Unnerving Mag, Black Static, Gamut Magazine, Lamplight and elsewhere. She is an instructor and columnist at LitReactor.com and lives in Sydney, Australia with her family. Visit her at http://www.thelivingsuitcase.com. and at twitter at @jsbreukelaar.

Ratings & Reviews

What do you think?
Rate this book

Friends & Following

Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!

Community Reviews

5 stars
21 (31%)
4 stars
17 (25%)
3 stars
16 (24%)
2 stars
4 (6%)
1 star
8 (12%)
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
Profile Image for Keith.
Author 10 books251 followers
January 18, 2016
Matt E. Lewis described this as "Under the Skin meets Mad Max with a sprinkle of The Road," which is funny not because any of those references really occurred to me, but because when I was reading I also couldn't help but attempt to process the story by way of combining things I already knew. I think what I came up with was "Species meets Netrunner with a sprinkle of Nicholas Sparks," and since Matt's references are much cooler you should listen to him, but the result is actually sort of the same.

So: an alien creature is sent to Earth to save its species by finding the perfect mate, and takes the form of a woman who kicks a lot of ass. The world she travels through is, by turns, either a pre-apocalypse or post-cyberpunk version of San Diego, which has become an urban sprawl called Spill City. She is driven by lust so deep that it's tearing her body apart. There's a lot of men in her life, but she's looking for The One With The Perfect Horn (which is exactly what you think, because yes, it matters). The men she follows have their own stories-- some bigger, some smaller. She lives in a trailer park and rescues an orphan and fights with the alien godmind in her head and tries, most of the time, not to be a horrible person despite not being a person at all.

So that's what happens, more or less, but the experience of reading--the reason it becomes so crucial to organize the information the book presents into manageable things you're already familiar with--is that American Monster is really disinterested in using these elements of genre and trope in order to make the story more digestible. Instead, science fiction and horror and love stories and world-building are all pulled from and reassembled into a Frankenstein's monster (ha ha) of analogy and metaphor collapsing in on itself. If you've ever been consumed by the primal need to fuck so deeply that you can't think straight, and that need has wrapped itself so tightly with your desire for love that you can't tell the difference, and if you know intimately how family provides as easily as it destroys, and if you often feel like there is a creature with barbed wings and a blue tongue swimming under your skin...

I mean, this is what science fiction and horror does. It's what it's about--recreating the real as unreal in order to describe it; to understand it. But too often, the use of genre also oversimplifies that which is being discussed--if life were easy to understand, we wouldn't need to reimagine it as a monster story.

In American Monster, the world exists in a frantic and feverish haze that feels very disorienting, very complicated, and very real. We mostly see it through the eyes of Norma, the titular monster, and that narrative shift to object-as-subject makes the story one of addiction and loneliness, rather than adventure. And in case we assume that this counter-trope also might be too simple on its own, the fact that she is a female protagonist who is vilified as much as she is humanized, and one who easily switches from sexual aggressor to maternal protector, further complicates the stereotypes of how women (and monsters) are treated (and mistreated) in these kinds of stories.

Despite a cast of mutant aliens, lonesome Iroquois, teenage acrobat-thieves, porn stars, drag queens, psychotic bikers, and Michael Jackson impersonators, American Monster is a book that broods, that is somber, that is morose, and that feels almost unpleasantly like real life. The book's characters are driven by needs they never quite define, and the narrative spends as much time grinding through their doldrums as it does exploding in sex or violence. It is a book for escapists who are not actually prepared to escape, and a book about people who might ultimately be unable to.
Profile Image for Lori.
1,552 reviews55.8k followers
February 24, 2014
Read 2/15/14 - 2/22/14
2.5 Stars - Recommended Lightly to fans of bizarro (because it's not quite bizarro enough) but should do nicely for straight up futuristic sci-fi fans.
332 Pages
Publisher: Lazy Fascist Press
Released: Feb 2014


I am huge fan of Lazy Fascist Press and admire the kinds of literature they publish and support. Every book they release looks and sounds amazing. They are one of the few small presses I endlessly solicit review copies from, unable to keep from drooling over the opportunity to be one of the first to read each title.

More often than not, their titles blow me away. Like, grab me by the throat with their words and choke me so hard I see stars (metaphorically, of course. Wouldn't it be cool if there were books out there that could actually make you see stars?!). Every once and a little while, though, I find myself reading one that's just... meh. There's nothing wrong with it exactly; it just seems to be missing that extra something that makes me go WOW.

And maybe that's not fair to the book. It's not the book's fault that I set the bar too high, you know. Maybe, right from the get-go, I set the book up for failure because I had these unrealistic notions of what the book would be, assigning it this totally unattainable goal of being my kind of awesome when it was never meant for me in the first place.

Such is the case with JS Breukelaar's American Monster. It looks all kinds of awesome. It sounds all kinds of awesome. But it's just not my kind of awesome.

Taking place in a futuristic California that has effectively removed itself from the United States, a being known as NORMa (a network operation requiring minimal access) is on the hunt for the ultimate human horn. Finding and tagging the horn is her one and only ticket home.

Norma isn't quite sure what she is - she looks human, and she certainly feels human, though there are parts to her that are otherworldly - and the longer she remains on earth searching for the elusive 'perfect' horn, the more determined she is to understand, and ultimately ignore, her mission. Her "Mommy", a body-less planetary consciousness of sorts, is a source of constant pressure and pain for her, demanding that Norma find an equivalent to the one Mommy let go all those years ago.

There are so many things happening here, on so many levels.

First, we've got a woman (part alien? part robot? part daemon? maybe a bit of all three mixed together? I never did get that part figured out) who can change her sex (she actually started out as a male named NORM when Mommy first created her) and carries some sort of tagging device in her dentata (erm, a curious term for her "vagina like hole") that is meant to be passed on/into the human horn (I'll let you take one guess) of her choosing. So basically, Norma is a horny, otherworldly being who is being driven around California by her semi-insatiable libido.

Aaand, she's got major Mommy issues. Mommy can communicate with her, and keep tabs on her, through all sorts of mangled technology - consoles, cell phones, anything electronic - though she can also, sometimes, squeeze her way into Norma's mind and cause her physical pain when she disobeys or when Mommy fears she is prolonging her hunt for THE horn. At first, Norma wants to make Mommy happy, but she quickly begins to devise ways to shut Mommy out, or at least impede her awareness a bit, as she desperately tries to come up with a Plan B. And this makes Mommy mad.

So yeah, there's some sex, and a whole lot of dentata-and-horn-talk, but there are also some pretty rad characters like her cross dressing BFF Bunny and the young, badass homeless girl Raye and her psychotic father Mac, who dreams of being Michael Jackson. Not to mention Gene, a gigantic bull of a man who falls hard for Norma and manages to keep her somewhat grounded when she feels as though she is spinning wildly out of control. And boy do things get wild and out of control.

I found myself confused pretty early on - as to what was going on and why it was going on - and that feeling of 'not quite knowing' followed me about half way through the book. At the midpoint, things finally seemed to start sliding into place and I found that the pace of the book actually began to pick up. I was more interested in what was going on between the characters and had a better grasp on the overall story. Sure, there were moments here and there in the second half that left me just as confused as I had been in the beginning (if not more so) but I was able to quickly get myself back on track and moving along again with the action.

My final verdict? American Monster was just a tad too weird and otherwordly for me. Though it sounded like it would be right up my alley, it took too many left and right turns and lost me somewhere waaaaay back there. I really had a difficult time letting the story just whisk me away.

This one is on me, you guys. It's totally all on me.
Profile Image for Kyle Muntz.
Author 7 books116 followers
May 5, 2014
American Monster is a bleak, gorgeously executed novel. It's science fiction written with the attention to feeling and place of realism; the occasional intense strangeness of bizarro; and the structural complexity of literary fiction.

This is also a very erotic novel, and a very honest one. It's a book that moves at the rhythm of life, where characters seem not so much to act as be acted upon; months pass in a second or a moment can go on for twenty pages. Like Norma, the narrative seems to splinter as it goes, dedicating chapters to characters she meets. Spill City (in the ruins of a California recovering from an ecological crisis, where most of the book takes ) is a gritty place swarming with life and strangeness.

It's also refreshing to see Breukelaar avoid potential tropes. I was worried in the beginning the narrative might become an issue of "is she insane/just imagining it etc?" but it hardly even came up. The worldbuilding is also impressively subtle: an accumulation of small details and very little upfront exposition.

In the end I think this book was too long, but it was done well enough that wasn't a problem, and should appeal to anyone interested in beautiful writing.
Profile Image for Ted Fauster.
Author 11 books43 followers
Read
October 16, 2019
AMERICAN MONSTER
by J.S. Breukelaar

A review by weird fantasy & speculative fiction author Ted Fauster

In Breukelaar’s first novel, those who “fall” are transformed into sentient planets known as brain worlds. AMERICAN MONSTER follows the disjointed (sometimes comical, often grotesque) efforts of one such celestial consciousness (KALI I8) as it struggles to free itself from its eternal prison by willing into existence as a kind of hunter/breeder known as Norma.

In effect, Norma is a demon. Although she doesn’t quite grasp this. She exists in a near-future devastated southern California region known as The Spill. Lots of otherworldly elements are folded (not blended) with very subtle hints of demonic possession and a kind of Matrix/Blade Runner universe gone rotten, resulting in a ripe, gooey slime that is so fun to squish between your fingers. This book hits the ground running and never stops.

From the very beginning, it’s made very clear what Norma is after. A horn. Driven on by the insatiable desire programmed into her celestial code by Mommy (Norma’s only connection to what she is, where she came from and why she exists), her only purpose is to combine with The Guy, which will somehow set off some sort of divine code that will free Kali I8. Mommy communicates with Norma via broken bits of discarded tech, berating, punishing and encouraging her along the way. Mommy is inescapable and always watching.

What Breukelaar has done is broken the mold of the traditional “man on a mission” novel. If this dark angel had been the one with the horn, I’m not sure the story would have been as satisfying. In fact, it might have been downright horrible to behold. To experience this techno tale of a fallen something-or-other, whose only purpose is to fornicate her way into oblivion, is incredibly refreshing. Norma is big, powerful and perfectly capable of bashing her way toward the end goal. This isn’t to say she is without fault, or that her crooked quest is simply a hack-and-slash walk in the park. Norma gets her ass handed to her. Several times.

In a way, Norma commits a cardinal sin. It’s not the sex, the killing, the stealing, the murderous rampages. Norma’s sin is something even more devastating, and it is one Mommy finds very hard to overlook.

For me, the most beautiful aspect of this story is how Norma consistently picks herself up and keeps going. She’s doomed to deal with her curse. But it is her eventual discovery of the ability to love that truly sets this book apart. I don’t know. Maybe it’s me, but women just seem to have a much better understanding of love and loss.

The language flows, while still retaining a satisfying visceral grit:

…He misfired his second round partly into pappy’s ass, so that the old man had begun to buckle, screaming, by the time she stove in the boy’s throat with her gel-armor elbow, rammed her fist into his face….

…The sun had gotten too big for Mommy, gave it a swollen head, or was it the other way around? Who had killed who? What had killed the First Beings?

I absolutely adored the thin veil drawn between the fierce aroma of the real world, the true America, and the ethereal transcendence of the astral spirit plane. I share a similar respect for the elegance deeply coded within not only the constructs of the universe but the way life perceives life, and in doing so imagines itself, warts and all, sinners and saints.

AMERICAN MONSTER is a masterfully coded techno/terror tale of cosmic horror and familial dysfunction.

Incidentally, Kali is the Hindu “mortal demon” and the source of all evil.
Profile Image for J.W. Wargo.
Author 1 book3 followers
March 3, 2014
(NOTE: I was given an advance reading copy of this book by the publisher to review.)

What spreads among us can be viewed as all that we are. Always seeking a better vantage point in an attempt to see more.

The writing is dense. Each paragraph layers poetic wordplay beautifully and naturally, sometimes referencing and re-referencing other parts of the book, so that a reveal here or there is not necessarily a total surprise but very satisfactory. An interesting construct of the text is how the dialogue was formatted. Rather than using quotation marks a dash begin each characters speech, and sometimes continuing speech has no indicator at all, adding to the tone of confusion the protagonist deals with but which was received happily by this reader.

Norma is a program. A construct designed by a Brainworld (i.e. A sentient planet) to find the perfect host. Untold ages ago, The Brainworld was crashed upon by a ship carrying beings, one of which the planet fell in love with. If love is obsession then this Brainworld became fully obsessed with the great horned creature. As timelines would have it, the star this perfectly whole planet orbits supernovas and destroys both planet and beings, but the sentience continues on. When the Brainworld experiences loss of that which it loved, there is only loneliness left behind. Loneliness and obsession.

Enter Norma, sent to Earth, to a radiated near-future California no longer united with its brother and sister states, to find the embodiment of the great horned one for Mommy, a.k.a. Kali I8, a.k.a. the Brainworld. Norma finds a home in Spill City, the so named area of Southern California with an ocean that splashes inky waves and dead fish onto its shoreline. She's on the hunt, she's a hunter. She's programmed for one mission, one plan, nothing else.

But what good is a virus without a little mutation? When Norma interacts with the ultimate virus, Humanity, how will it change her program and, more importantly, those around her she has grown to love, or obsess over, the most?

I really loved this book. I believe it achieved what it set out to do, that of combining the Literary genre with those of Science Fiction and Horror, seamlessly and fluidly. It is so well constructed it makes one excited to read. Don't miss out on this one.
Profile Image for Pedro Proença.
Author 5 books40 followers
October 7, 2014
A highly complex work, J.S. Breukelaar's "American Monster" is the sci-fi story of Norma, a being created by KALI 18 to find the Guy with the perfect horn. And when we say "horn", we mean his penis.
This was a truly tough read for me, because my mind was busy with so much stuff, and it took me a long time to finish it. But, it was worth it. Norma's views on the human race, on love, on society in general are thoughtful and well written. The author went to great lenghts to craft each sentence perfectly, and it shows. A dark science fiction story, very contemplative and insightful. Read it with an open mind, and enjoy all of this beautiful complexity.
Profile Image for Stephen Toman.
Author 6 books14 followers
June 2, 2019
I listened to a couple of interviews before reading this and JS Breukelaar comes across as just the loveliest person in the world. See that bit in the JDO show where she lets Osborne know how good Black Gum is?

American Monster is a dense book. Reminds me a little of M John Harrison, Nova Swing especially. There are things going on here it would take a few reads to unravel but for a first read I enjoyed letting the strange atmosphere and weird grotesque imagery wash over me.
Profile Image for Samuel Moss.
Author 5 books60 followers
June 26, 2014
A mix of classic sci-fi/cyberpunk and some totally out there, bizarre ideas. There was some very, very good writing in this novel but there were a few stretches (some fairly long) which could have used tightening up.
Profile Image for Dan Barr.
35 reviews
February 4, 2022
I really can't tell if I love this book, or just like this book.

American Monster is so beautifully written that I often didn't care that I had absolutely no idea what was happening. It reminds me a little of Samuel R Delaney in that way, where I can be both utterly confused and totally enthralled at the same time. Unfortunately, Breukelaar doesn't have the same handle on characters and setting that Delaney has, so it was hard to get as invested. Norma, the protagonist, is pretty well fleshed out, but the other characters, even main ones, kinda just exist I never really got a grasp on what THEY were doing in this story.

The beginning of this book is really difficult to follow, seeming to have some timeline and setting issues (all definitely intentional, so don't think that Breukelaar doesn't know what she's doing). But, once the book gets going, except for the occasional time weirdness or out-of-place event or character, it's great fun to read. Once you get a handle on the story within the story, the hole in the whole, as Norma might put it, things become surprisingly clear for such a densely written book.

So I think "like," with a great desire to "love."
Profile Image for Marisha.
46 reviews3 followers
February 16, 2019
A very intimate SF story set in a future America that is painted carefully but imprecisely with a very stream-of-consciousness writing style that threatens to be obscure or frustrating, but somehow pulls it off. Even dialogue is not demarcated by anything as rigid as quotation marks, and so events, thoughts, and speech sometimes get muddled or mixed. there were times I had to re-read a section or two to figure out what actually occurred in the narrative. but the writing is so lovely that I didn't mind. it was a pleasure to ride with Norm/a and watch her transformation from an alien subroutine into a more and more conscious being, her dual natures at war, in the midst of a broken future.
Profile Image for Matt Lewis.
Author 7 books30 followers
February 16, 2016
Saying that this book is like a Mad Max-version of 'Under the Skin' with a sprinkle of 'The Road' would be pretty apt and give some clue as to what lies ahead. The initial concept is confusing at first, but once you get far enough into it and start to learn the characters better, you'll find an incredibly original take on Sci-Fi, peppered with gorgeous sentences and a situational awareness that's extremely rare for the genre. Although the backdrop and its elements feature some fairly well-known tropes within post-apocalyptic fiction, the story developed within this universe brings a kind of humanity that is all too few and far between within these kinds of books. The book is filled with the same kind of futuristic ultra-violence as 'Skullcrack City' (also from Lazy Fascist) but it's tempered with a slower, more meaningful pace and character development that outshines almost any book I've read this year. I suppose I'm also a bit of a sucker for localism; the whole thing takes place in Southern California, namely San Diego (renamed Spill City in the book) and features many places and landmarks that are familiar to me. But what was fantastic about it was the way she incorporated the landscape! It doesn't feel shoehorned in, like so many other books that attempt to use San Diego as a backdrop. The fact that I started reading this on the coaster from LA back home, and passed by many of the locations described in the book on a particularly grimy day...

The ONE complaint I have about this book is that I think the title should have been something else. It doesn't seem to be an appropriate description of the book, and may attract a reader expecting something else completely. To be fair, I racked my brain trying to think of what else it would be called and couldn't think of anything else that worked.

I came into this book with mild expectations, but I was thoroughly impressed by the depth of the story, the attention to detail, the world-building, and the strange even by Sci-Fi standards concept. To be honest, I was blown away. The fact that this book doesn't get as much praise and recognition as lesser books within the genre is a fucking war crime.
Profile Image for Janos Honkonen.
Author 26 books26 followers
November 20, 2016
American Monster came across as little bit bizarro, little bit cyberpunk, a novel with vivid and rich imagery and some pretty interesting ideas. But. If I had to recount the actual plot and recall why the characters were where they were or did what they did... welp, drawing a blank. For me it came across as a series of interesting and beautifully written locales and moments, but I was left wanting a dose of "...and why are we here again and where is this all going".
Profile Image for David Piwinski.
299 reviews18 followers
April 22, 2016
Giving this 2.5 stars. On the plus side, the writing is pretty good, the characters are memorable, and the post-apocalyptic California setting is cool. Unfortunately, the plot is weak and dull and I had a hard time caring about what was happening most of the time. Some interesting ideas here, but overall it felt aimless and pointless. Not recommended.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews

Can't find what you're looking for?

Get help and learn more about the design.