“My family is spectacularly bad at endings,” admits Noah Turner, the narrator of Shaun Hamill’s A Cosmology of Monsters. “We never handle them with grace. But we’re not great with beginnings, either.”
This, it turns out, is a bit of an understatement. The Turner family, bless their haunted hearts, aren’t all that great at a lot of things—their existence in Vandergriff, Texas, a fictional small town near the Metroplex, is marked with financial instability, resentment, and a propensity to hurt one another at nearly every opportunity. Lovable they’re not, but they’re great at scaring people—as is Arlington native Hamill, whose debut novel is a beautifully crafted and terrifying thrill ride of a book.
