TownNews.com Content Exchange

“A Cosmology of Monsters” is the first novel from Shaun Hamill, a recent Texas transplant to Alabama. The book is a family saga about the anguish of coming of age. It is a horror novel about the horrors of living. It is also very much about the redemptive nature of love.

A cosmology studies the origins and eventual structure of a universe and its culture. Using this concept to structure his novel, Hamill examines one family and how it attempts to survive life in a small Texas town.

Harry Turner and Margaret Byrne meet at a Texas college. He is a “townie” who pays his school tuition by working at McDonald’s. He has always been a dreamer, collecting old comic books and horror literature from the likes of H.P. Lovecraft. (Someone refers to him as “a grown man who still reads ghost and monster stories.”)

She is pragmatic to a fault; she expects things from life. She has never wanted children, yet she and Harry marry and start life together, eventually having three children. Now she seems to be always focused on keeping her family from falling apart.

Their older daughter, Sydney, is talented, unguarded and very taken with remaining in life’s spotlight. Middle child Eunice senses too much about life’s vagaries and has taken to writing about them. And then there’s the youngest, Noah.

It is Noah who sees monsters — life’s actual monsters as well as the ones from another level of existence — and comes to recognize both for what they are. There’s especially one that’s been haunting the family for generations and that has recently come scratching at Noah’s bedroom window.

Hamill brings all of this together in a book that author Stephen King has likened to the family sagas of John Irving (“The World According to Garp,” “The Hotel New Hampshire,” “The Cider House Rules”) if Irving had written a horror novel. It’s an apt comparison.

In fact, while it certainly turns out to be as non-traditional as the families in Irving’s works, the Turner family is still haunted by many of the same struggles any family has.

Someone even asks late in the novel, “What’s a haunted house like?” Well, just look toward the Turners and their everyday oddities.

The novel is structured around a number of Halloweens as this seemingly non-traditional family makes ends meet by running The Wandering Dark, a haunted house in which Noah eventually dresses as the monster that has visited him frequently in his youth, a monster described as “a flickering mass … looking with bright orange eyes … kind of like if the big bad wolf went out in Little Red Riding Hood’s cloak.” It’s that seemingly benign monster that has befriended the younger Noah as those in his family have excluded him.

It is primarily through Noah’s eyes that Hamill shows us that “Life makes monsters of everyone, but it’s always possible to come back.” In true Lovecraftian fashion, there’s also, in another existence, The City, where those monsters wait. And there’s a price that must be paid for “coming back.” After all, it’s a horror novel.

It’s also a horror novel with its share of overwrought metaphors: “The air was thick and fetid, the trees inky and dense as an Impressionist’s brushstrokes.” And it’s a horror novel with some rather overwrought sex scenes, too, overwrought enough to make us question their necessity.

For, at its heart, “A Cosmology of Monsters” is very much about a family whose members are not all that different from most of us. The book is also very much about how, as the adult Noah expresses it at novel’s end, “Adulthood gets us all in the end.”

It is those moments that are some of the author’s best and most touching. It is those moments that Shaun Hamill surely has in mind as he reminds us that “we can’t make new happiness past a certain point, but we can linger in past joy forever, perfectly captured with the rememberer’s eye.”

Steven Whitton is a retired Professor of English.

This article originally ran on annistonstar.com.

0
0
0
0
0

Tags

Locations

TownNews.com Content Exchange
Load comments