DNF. Unfortunately, this was a book I started multiple times but could just not get into. I appreciate having the opportunity to read this book, it was just not a good fit for me as a reader. Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for my gifted review copy.

Set against the backdrop of the “Dahmer summer” of 1991, debut author Willa C. Richards’ THE COMFORT OF MONSTERS is a haunting page-turner about the aftermath of a shocking disappearance and the hold that memory has over us.

Thirty years ago, Peg’s younger sister, Candace “Dee” McBride, vanished without a trace on the Fourth of July in the middle of a summer of racial unrest, a divided and beleaguered police force, and the serial killings of a then-unknown Jeffrey Dahmer. Labeled a “noncritical” case by the Milwaukee police, Dee’s disappearance went uninvestigated for too long. The evidence, suspicions and memories of her family, friends and coworkers dried up like deserted house plants over the following years.

However, with Peg’s mother on her deathbed, the McBride family revisits Dee’s case themselves. They draw upon the gifts of famed psychic Thomas Alexander to help them find Dee’s body --- if not solve the case --- so that she finally can be laid to rest alongside her mother. But as Thomas delivers shocking blows, Peg, who has strived to remember every single detail of that summer, finds her memory riddled with holes she didn’t know were there.

Written in two timelines, one chronicling the summer of Dee’s disappearance and the other tracing the family’s new investigation with Thomas, THE COMFORT OF MONSTERS unfolds slowly, with Peg driving the action through recollection and grief. In 1991, we meet a teenaged Dee, head over heels in love with her much older boyfriend, Frank. Though Peg and Dee have always been close, Dee’s romance with Frank, who Peg finds creepy and gross, drives a wedge between them, one rarely confronted by either sibling, as both are involved in their own love lives and careers. Peg is dating a man named Leif, and though he is less obviously dangerous than Frank, their relationship, particularly in the bedroom, hinges on an unspoken fault line of violence.

Though the sisters never become entirely estranged, their relationship is only unified when Leif’s younger brother, Erik, comes to town. Newly out to his homophobic family, Erik thrives in Milwaukee’s gay party scene, but even he can see that something terrible and dangerous has woven its way into the safe spaces and gay bars where people like him have found refuge. Young men, mostly those of color, are disappearing, and with homophobia guiding the police and media, no one is keeping track of their cases. In an effort to protect Erik from a similar fate, Peg and Dee take turns housing him, despite their boyfriends’ complaints.

The Milwaukee of 1991 is one of the most racially segregated cities in the country, and Richards painstakingly evokes a sense of the urgency and drama unfolding there, even as Peg and Dee are consumed by their own petty dramas and slights. Bordered by gorgeous waterways and murky swamplands, and ridden with violence and poverty, it is a city built on contrasts. The power of nature is ever-present, but so too is the draw of city life, drugs and money, sex and brutality. Peg and Dee alone seem like a bright spot in Milwaukee’s drudgery, two sisters who call one another “babe,” who can go out drinking as easily as they can stay in watching television and snuggling. But when Frank mistakes Erik for a competitor, and Peg and Dee find themselves self-soothing with drugs and alcohol, Dee witnesses a horrifying moment in Peg’s relationship and flees, never to be seen again.

Thirty years later, Thomas mentions this singular, secret moment to Peg, something that only she and the detective long ago assigned to Dee’s case know. So she is forced to reconcile her memories of that summer with the hard facts of the remaining evidence. But digging deep into her memories --- particularly those blinded by the media explosion of the Dahmer case and others warped by substance abuse, trauma and grief --- raises doubts in the facts that she previously took for granted, and she starts to wonder if she could have done something to prevent her sister’s disappearance. All the while, she must question the act of memorizing and the notion that it is only after the fact that we can determine which details are worth committing to memory, often long after they have lost their crystal-clear luster and become malleable to the effects of time.

THE COMFORT OF MONSTERS is a slow burn novel, neither flashy nor twisty, yet undeniably compelling and complex. Through the combination of a “missing girl” plotline and a setting marked by a summer of death and disappearance, Richards is able to tackle numerous heavy, poignant themes in one fell swoop. Through Peg, she unpacks the legacy of misogyny that deems women conniving and cunning, unworthy of belief, while also probing the flaws in memory, our most powerful yet most pliable tool for uncovering the truth. Through Peg's relationship with Dee, Richards confronts the competitive nature that exists in women, the ways that we all want to be better and more desirable than one another, even when we know the prize for beauty and attractiveness is often more misogyny.

Finally, through the backdrop of the Dahmer case, Richards draws searing comparisons to the Black Lives Matter movement, highlighting the ways that the very systems set in place to protect us have failed our most vulnerable citizens. In less dexterous hands, Dahmer's presence would be distracting or disorienting. But for Richards, having already crafted an evocative sense of time and place, it feels necessary, as much a part of Dee’s disappearance as a body would be if only Peg and the Milwaukee police could find one.

A haunting exploration of memory and consequence, THE COMFORT OF MONSTERS is a riveting novel perfect for fans of Elizabeth Wetmore's VALENTINE and Emma Cline's THE GIRLS. This is not an easy book to read, as Richards is unflinching in her depictions of violence and tragedy, but it is a creative and exceptionally clear-eyed one and most certainly will stay with you.

In a personal way, I was turned off by the overt feminism that really bled through the text, and felt more like browbeating that empowering looks at women and the ways they are treated in today's society/yesterday's world as well. As a gay man, for example, I do enjoy a great book that speaks to empowering people around me, but felt that, like in this example, books like this don't help further a conversation or agenda, but really hinder it by shoving something down someone's throat instead of working to help empower people by creating a great story that effectively relates a message. That can seem somewhat like a personal view, and maybe it is, but I do feel like it would affect a lot of people similarly.

Reviews on THE COMFORT OF MONSTERS is mixed but I was completely enveloped by it. It gave me a lot of Gillian Flynn vibes; a dark, brooding mystery surrounding a missing woman and her sister's decades long attempts to find out what happened. But it's not a straight-forward psychological thriller. I would say it lands more in the literary fiction section, with intense prose and a story that sometimes makes you feel like you are underwater.

We move back and forth between 1991, leading up to Dee's disappearance, and 2019, when her family invites a celebrity psychic to try to help them figure out where her body might be so that she can finally be buried. Reader beware: answers do not come fast (if at all) because the story is more about Peg, her sister, what happened the summer her sister went missing, and how it has affected the rest of her life. Yes, the blurb sets the story during the Milwaukee "summer of Dahmer" which makes it seems like this is a story about a serial killer, but it's not really and I don't want to say it's a slog to get through (but it may be if you are picking it up thinking it's a true crime-esque story). It's a fantastic debut, though I think it could have been edited down a bit. Perfect if you are looking for an intense character study with an underlying mystery.

Oh, wow, was The Comfort of Monsters an intense read! I remember when the Dahmer story broke and Willa Richards has done an excellent job of capturing the time--and the tension. This had intense atmosphere and thoughtfully drawn characters and I was totally sucked in! It definitely is one of the standout reads of the summer.

There are some great ideas in this novel and above average writing. Unfortunately, I found this title very uneven. Some things I liked: the sense of time and place--I think folks from Milwaukee and environs will particularly enjoy the literary trip through the city. I also appreciated--enjoyed is probably not the right word--the inclusion of the crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer and issues related to the victims and lax policing. However, the relationship between the sisters as related by the narrator is troubling and made me the reader uncomfortable. The same must be said for the scenes of violent sex. Finally, I found the lack of a coherent resolution, or any resolution at all, solidified my thinking that this title was not for me.

I really enjoyed this, maybe because I was the same age in the nineties as the characters in the flashbacks. I can remember everything about Dahmer, Milwaukee, etc. I could really appreciate the way Willa Richards weaved the story into the atmosphere of the time.

I don’t know what the statistics are on unsolved murders versus solved murders, but I do know that there are a lot more of the former than the latter. Sometimes cases go unsolved because there are no clues to follow, or because the technology doesn’t exist that can analyze the clues. Sometimes, a murder goes unsolved because no one knows a crime occurred. Hopefully, rarely, murders go unsolved because no one cares. A combination of all of these factors conspire to keep the disappearance of protagonist Margaret McBride’s sister in The Comfort of Monsters, by Willa C. Richards. Dee McBride disappeared around the same time that Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested and his mind-bogglingly horrific crimes came to light. Years later, no one knows what happened to her.

The Comfort of Monsters moves back and forth between 1991 and now. Both plotlines center on Margaret McBride. The Margaret of now is a barely functioning woman. She has just lost her job (again). Her family and romantic relationships are tenuous and fraught. Her Milwaukee apartment is full of case notes, testimonies, and legal textbooks that Margaret uses to constantly go over what she knows about her sister’s disappearance in July 1991. Margaret and her family have tried everything they can think of to find Dee. By the time we meet them, the McBrides are about to hire a very expensive TV psychic in a last ditch effort to find Dee’s remains. The Margaret of 1991 is, if not carefree, certainly someone who has no fucks to give. She drinks, does drugs, and spends a lot of time in sketchy places with her sister, Dee. Margaret and her boyfriend (with whom she has what we would now call a BDSM relationship, but they don’t have any rules or safe words) live in Riverwest, the same neighborhood as Dahmer. They don’t know this, of course, until the rest of the city finds out what he was up to in his apartment.

Dee’s disappearance is completely unrelated to Dahmer, but Dahmer kept the police so busy that the McBride’s only have one uninterested detective to look into Dee’s disappearance. Margaret pushes for Detective Wolski to look into Dee’s abusive boyfriend, but Wolski thinks that Dee just packed up and left. Dee’s fictional case is contrasted the murders of Konerak Sinthasomphone and the rest of Dahmer’s victims. Wolski’s indifference looks a lot like the Milwaukee Police Department’s indifference to crimes committed against gay men. By the time the police start to act, it’s too late to collect evidence and witness memories have faded. Thirty years later, in Dee’s case, it’s little wonder that the McBrides have called in a psychic. I’m not sure what’s worse for them: having no hope or having just enough hope to think that, all these years later, they might have an answer.

At the same time this is going on, we also get to see how Dee’s disappearance has affected Margaret. The sisters were incredibly close. No matter how much they fought, they would always make up. They shared each other’s secrets. They also share a similar affinity for men who “just can’t control themselves.” In Margaret’s case, we know that she likes rough sex (although she’s very ashamed of it). I’m not sure about Dee. Her boyfriend is violent, too, but more in the controlling/angry model. The juxtaposition is deeply unsettling because it forces you to try and find the line between different kinds of violence. Can a couple be said to have a healthy relationship if they never set boundaries on what one half can do to the other? If there are no safe words? If they’ve never even discussed this part of their sex life? Is it acceptable kink? Or is Margaret’s boyfriend another abuser? Someone with more knowledge of BDSM might be able to answer these questions.

The Comfort of Monsters is a challenging read, for so many reasons. And yet, I found myself fascinated by the questions Richards’ raised in her story. The Comfort of Monsters falls into the growing subgenre of mystery novels that examine the long aftermath of violent crime and that tell the stories of the people who are left behind to try and rebuild their lives after a loved one has been taken from them. In this example, we see characters who don’t know what happened to their loved one, not even where their remains are, after three decades. Readers who also like more intellectual true crime should enjoy this book, if they can handle the mix of sex and violence.

I really loved the slow simmer of this book. It was beautifully written and wasn’t flashy or twisty, but kept a steady level of dread and confusion and sadness throughout. Peg's struggle to reconcile her memories while trying to figure out what happened to her sister Dee thirty years ago was heartbreaking.

I was also super into it being set in Milwaukee during "the Dahmer summer" and the smart social commentary Richards included about my messed up, highly segregated, hometown and the racism and homophobia rampant in policing (especially then, but obviously still happening today).

I was 16 and lived in Milwaukee in 1991 and have vague recollections of reading about how his victims were men and that they were dismembered and that the police sent a badly injured 14-year-old boy back into the killer’s apartment to be murdered, but I didn’t really understand the full extent to which the police screwed up and how much the bias against the types of victims he targeted allowed him to operate for years before being caught. It’s all so upsetting and gross.

---- “It turns out you often have to be a lot of things to make the news care about you and to make you worthy of search and rescue. This is why you’ve heard about that woman who got kidnapped in Utah, but you can’t name a single man the serial killer murdered.” ----

I also LOVE that Richards refers to him as "the serial killer" throughout the book, rather than repeating his name over and over. We shouldn't focus on the killers. We should remember the victims and the survivors.

Highly recommended!

NetGalley says my review has to be at least 100 characters long. But I don't want to say too much, because my full review will appear in Booklist! Please look for it there. :-)

I received an ARC of this novel from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Peg, disengaged from her life, begins a search for her sister at the bequest of her dying mother. Secrets are revealed, and relationships with family are tested.

Riveting read. The plot is not as I expected.

It’s been thirty years since Dee McBride disappeared, but now with her mother on her deathbed, Dee’s sister, Peg attempts to find answers to soothe their dying mother. Peg brings in a psychic, desperate for any information about her long lost sister. She’s swept back to Milwaukee in the early 1990’s a time when police and the press were obsessed with the gruesome crimes of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. A time when one missing teenager was overlooked by everyone but her own family. Peg searches through her memories, could she have done something to save Dee? Was there anything anyone could have done? As Peg begins to question her own events of the past, she tries to come to grips with the loss of her sister and the impending loss of her mother. A deeply moving story