Monster – C J Skuse
At sixteen Nash thought that the fight to become Head Girl of prestigious boarding school Bathory would be the biggest battle she’d face. Until her brother’s disappearance leads to Nash being trapped at the school over Christmas with Bathory’s assorted misfits.
As a blizzard rages outside, strange things are afoot in the school’s hallways, and legends of the mysterious Beast of Bathory – a big cat rumoured to room the moors outside the school – run wild.
Yet when the girls’ Matron goes missing it’s clear that something altogether darker is to blame – and that they’ll have to stick together if they hope to survive.
My review copy came from Maximum Pop books.
A girls boarding school, the winter holidays and half a dozen girls are unable to travel home for the holidays so are stuck in their remote school over Christmas with just a single adult (the school matron) to supervise them.
My previous experience of reading about girls boarding schools only extends to the Enid Blyton Mallory Towers books, however, it is pleasing to see that the bitchy infighting between the girls is still very much in evidence and still makes for fun reading. It should be noted that CJ Skuse adds an extra level of bitchiness and takes the sexual references to a level that would have made Ms Blyton blush.
But what of the titular Monster? Well it seems that the remote school may have a mysterious monster running free in the woodland and open moors which surround the school and its grounds. Several of the girls claim to have spotted it over the years but no one is ab e to give an accurate description of what they have seen – assuming they actually tell anyone that they have seen the monster in the first place!
Monster follows Nash – she wants to become Head Girl of Bathory Boarding School but she is facing stiff competition and is also having to deal with personal trauma as her beloved older brother has gone missing and is feared dead. We see Nash struggle to maintain a degree of control as she tries to balance her impeccable image at school while facing taunting and snide jokes from some of the meaner girls she boards with.
I don’t read many YA novels but sometimes I find that the content can be more shocking or explicit than I originally expected. Monster begins with quite a mild tone and keeps this going for the majority of the book – until the endgame where CJ Skuse unshackles the restraint and delivers a nasty and quite brutal reward.
At the end of Monster I was left with the sense of having experienced a classic Doctor Who story. In the 60’s there was a period of time where the Doctor experienced a sequence of stories defined as ‘Base under Siege’ and this is how I viewed Monster. A small band of humans battling for survival against the odds with a Monster lurking and picking them off.
All good fun and very readable.
Monster is published by Mira Ink and is available now in paperback and digital format.