Cherokee author Andrea L. Rogers follows the harrowing history of one family's encounters with both anthropogenic and preternatural horrors in her intricate, chilling YA story collection, Man Made Monsters. Illustrations by Cherokee artist and language technologist Jeff Edwards bring an additional layer of stark gravity to Rogers's hair-raising episodes.
The opening story, "An Old-Fashioned Girl," picks up in the middle of the Wilson family's flight to Indian Territory in 1839, "chased by human monsters, monsters who lived on blood and sorrow." Their deadly run-in with a mysterious well-dressed man sets the stage for generations of supernatural encounters. A boy in 1866 receives the intervention of fairy-like people reminiscent of the Nunnehi in "An Un-Fairy Story." A news article details a standoff between two Cherokee soldiers and a fearsome beast in "Hell Hound in No Man's Land." A young woman strikes up an unusual romance with a Goat Boy in Texas one summer in the late 1960s. A host of zombies, ghosts, creatures and one wayward alien continue to make contact through the years, with consequences that range from terrifying to beneficial or utterly strange. As time progresses, so too do the faces of genocide and oppression, becoming less blatant but increasingly pernicious. Forced removal, the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women's Crisis and a host of other casual and catastrophic cruelties haunt generations of a family as its members lean on each other and their cultural teachings to survive.
Rogers's roster of monsters draws from a diverse pool of horror genre standards, cryptids and Cherokee stories. Her disarmingly direct prose leaps nimbly between points of view, each protagonist a beautifully realized individual. Recurring character Ama, whose supernaturally long life lets her stay involved with generations of her family, is complex and compelling enough to carry a novel. Characters' lives are embroidered with historical context and cultural knowledge in impressive detail, adding to the sense of interconnectedness between stories. Rogers integrates Cherokee words seamlessly throughout the text, along with Spanish and German where historically appropriate. Edwards's illustrations, white on black backgrounds, often incorporate the Cherokee syllabary, words running up the throat of a cat with a knowing expression, across the stocks and barrels of World War I rifles and through the workings of a sinuous human heart. Teen and adult readers looking for a taste of the gorgeously gruesome should snap up this dark, engrossing jewel. --Jaclyn Fulwood, youth experience manager, Dayton Metro Library
Shelf Talker: Drawing from genre staple monsters and traditional stories, Cherokee author Andrea Rogers's short story horror collection combines supernatural and manmade atrocities.