My Favorite Thing Is Monsters

“I now can’t get it out of my head that there was someone with Anka…a shadow… […] She reminded me of this freaky painting in the museum. Not that Anka looked or acted like the Magdalene holding a skull in her lap…No…It was something about the darkness…The shadows that hung heavy above them both.”

Karen uses her knowledge of art, religion, and mythology throughout the story to try to solve Anka’s murder. The first painting she thinks about is the Magdalene, in which she sits looking solemn, holding a skull in her lap. The painting symbolizes one’s mortality and forces the onlooker to confront their own. This woman reminds Karen of Anka, because behind the Magdalene in the shadows lurks an evil-looking face. Karen knew Anka to be lonely, depressed, and off-kilter. Karen thinks that Anka may have had a demon or ghost haunting her, which resulted in her death.

“For some reason while we were in front of Fuseli’s masterpiece, I thought about Anka… […] Sure, the demon is a problem, but something from her past is torturing the lady in the painting.”

Once again, Karen uses art to fuel her detective work. She and Deeze take a trip to the art gallery and stop in front of Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare. Like the painting of the Magdalene with her skull, the lady in this painting is haunted by some evil or darkness. A demon sits on top of her, as if he has control over the woman underneath him. The woman is positioned in a sexual manner with her breasts accentuated, as if to say that her pain is related to sex. This turns out to be the case for Anka too, when it is revealed that she lived her childhood in brothels.

“He said that out of this shape, that is like an eye on its side, ‘the whole world is born.’ Every shape that is known comes from the vesica piscis.”

Karen learns about art and form from her brother, Deeze. Deeze not only teaches her history and comprehension, but also the foundations of art itself. The vesica piscis looks like a sideways eye and is formed by the intersection of two circles. It is a piece of sacred geometry that is used to build every other shape in existence. This parallels to the inner foundations of the Reyes siblings. Both Karen and Deeze have two sides to themselves—Karen the monster and the human, Deeze the knight and the dragon.

“Every person who sees this painting gets to end the story any way he or she wants to. What do you think?”

Deeze teaches Karen about the power of art, and what makes it so unique: It can be interpreted in an infinite number of ways. As the they stand in front of a painting of men on a small boat lost at sea, Deeze explains that viewers can decide whether they survive or not, or whether something very strange happens. The creativity and skills of reasoning that Karen develops through these talks are what help her to later investigate real-life secrets.

“Sometimes it’s like I’m in the painting…Do you know what I mean, Kare?”

Many of Karen’s drawings feature her, her family, or Anka fully immersed in the world of a painting, fairy tale, or myth. Deeze teaches Karen how to see, hear, taste, and smell the paintings, and in doing so, her childlike imagination leads her to become fully integrated with them. Karen can be seen wading in a sea of sharks or painted in pointillism, and Anka is drawn in a garden full of gods. The way that Karen deeply understands paintings allows her to become insightful and mature beyond her years and gives her the wisdom she needs to uncover hidden truths about Anka and her family.

“Right at that minute the Deeze in the gallery hollered at me. I found myself standing in front of the painting with both hands squarely on it—a big no-no. I couldn’t help wondering what terrible thing kept eight-year-old Deeze hiding in the cave.”

Karen has another memory of her first trip to the art museum. After learning from Deeze about how to immerse herself inside the paintings, Karen does just that. She comes upon a cave within a painting, and inside is an eight-year-old boy. She knows it to be Deeze. When Karen comes out of her fantasy, she finds herself with both hands on the painting, with Deeze warning her not to touch the painting again. The flashback serves to foreshadow Karen’s many attempts to uncover Deeze’s past and the final revelation of his murders of Anka and Victor.

“Sometimes you don’t let yourself know what you know.”

Karen’s mother finds out that Deeze had an affair with Anka and becomes irate with him. Deeze becomes defensive and ends up shutting down the conversation. As Karen listens in, she knows there is more to this story than the affair, although she is not quite sure what, yet. She lives in a state of denial for a while, not being willing to accept the possibility of her brother doing something as sinister as murdering Anka. This is not the only truth that Karen denies in herself; she also denies her queerness, and her mother’s inevitable death.

“I will find us a maker and get the bite and I’ll bring it home and bite you and Deeze…And we’ll live forever…together. I promise.”

Karen has a secret wish: to save herself and her family from death. Because Karen believes in monsters, her solution to this is to become undead. When she first finds out that her mother has cancer, she is shown standing over her mother’s bed in full werewolf form. Her depiction of herself as a savior in werewolf form further aligns Karen with her love for monsters, and how she sees imaginary monsters as a mode of escape from her real horrors.

“When Anka used to spot me hiding in her jungle she’d come up to the landing. ‘I’ll signal you when the secret police are gone,’ she’d whisper and that always gave me a thrill of secret danger.”

Another memory of Karen’s foreshadows the knowledge that is soon to be brought to the foreground. Karen and Anka live in the same apartment complex, and Anka has a garden in the foyer outside her apartment. She built this garden to remind her of her time with Sonja in the garden as a child, and it provides her with peace. Karen also finds solace in Anka’s garden and goes there often to escape the chaos of her life.

“Always on its way and always leaving, always here and always gone, the only house in which we live our lives and thus we are homeless.”

Sam Silverberg is drinking and distraught over his wife’s death and begins rambling about the state of the world. He is shown slumped on the floor, neck down, cigarette in hand, much like the famous Picasso painting of the guitarist. Karen says he looks and smells like blue. Then Sam makes this statement, which Karen feels like must be a riddle. He speaks to the constant changes that make all things temporary. For Sam, his home was in Anka, and now that she is gone, he feels like he is homeless. He laments that, like all things, his time with Anka was fleeting.

“But in truth Anka was an unconventional hero and I don’t believe that Anka…took her own life.”

Like Karen, Anka’s husband Sam does not believe that Anka died by suicide. Both sense something more sinister at play. When Sam calls Anka an unconventional hero, he is referring to her steadfastness and ability to survive the most horrific experiences. Throughout Anka’s life, she was abused, neglected, and victimized. Sam sees his wife as someone who overcame all of that, despite the mental illness that plagued her in the last years of her life.

“Yet, as it always did, the hot ember of her cigarette bit me (and bit me worse than it ever had before) and I knew then that my mad mother would never allow me the complacency of trust, when below us she clearly saw the miles and miles of hungry freezing darkness…”

Over the tape recorder, Karen and Sam listen to Anka’s account of her childhood in the brothel. Anka feels as if her mother is teaching her to never trust anything anyone tells her, and to understand that even the person who is meant to love and keep Anka safe will not. Anka’s mother is hateful towards the world and wants her daughter to be the same way.

“There are secret unspoken words that flow from a mother to her child. It starts when the child is inside of her. Because of the secret words, either the child will feel that the door of the world is closed to them or that they are welcomed. For the child who isn’t welcomed there is always the impulse to oblige the mother…and leave. This temptation whispers to them all their lives. It tips their better judgement off balance. It causes them to ignore their intuition, to dance at the edge of the chasm.”

Anka’s mother was hateful and did not want her, eventually trafficking her. As a result, Anka did not feel welcomed or loved by the world. This feeling stayed with her throughout her life, with Sam being the only person she was ever able to love. Anka admits that the thought of suicide looms over her life, but still neither Sam nor Karen is convinced that that is how she died.

“The men we called the walking wounded, soldiers from the Great War, had at least one place that their deformities would be overlooked, even accepted. Unlike most people, often the whores could see below the surface of people…From inside of my shyness I understood the value of the brothel ladies’ attention…They noticed me, saw my injuries and with their loving brutality they bit into me like fierce rasps, attempting to chew the rough bits from the wood with rows of tiny metal teeth…”

Anka feels that she learned many tough lessons from the ladies who worked and lived in the brothel. These women were accepting of all people, in their own strange way. Anka felt that she, too, was accepted by them despite being hurt and traumatized. Their honesty helped her gain confidence in herself.

“Deeze says that most things in life aren’t right or wrong. He says there’s not too much black or white. To his eyes most stuff is like a pencil shading. Lots of shades of gray. Mama says different. She believes it’s either right or wrong. Me? I think they’re both wrong. For me it’s like in a photograph. You have to look close. It looks like shades of gray, but it’s really lots and lots of tiny dots of inky black on a perfect page of white.”

Everyone in Karen’s life has a different view of morality. She realizes this at a younger age than most. Karen sees morality in a unique way, through the lens of her experience with art. To her, right and wrong are separate, but often so closely combined that it is difficult to tell them apart. Only when viewed at close range can they be seen for what they are.

“This is just another reason why being a human girl stinks compared to being a monster.”

Karen is accosted by a group of boys from her school as she walks the streets one day. They begin talking about raping her and one boy begins to undo his pants. Karen’s friend Franklin sees what is happening and interferes, saving Karen. As Karen reflects on the moment, she once again wishes she could be a monster, so that she would not be victimized and so that she could speak out against people who commit brutal acts.

“Dear girl…er uh…or whatever you are…I will tell you this, though, I get the strong sense that the reason you’re here talking to me now is that you know very well who you saw in the darkness behind your murdered pal…”

Karen performs her usual talent of immersing herself in the painting and strikes a conversation with the demon in the shadows. She wants to know what happened to Anka and asks if one of his kind may be responsible. Although the demon cannot say for certain, he does not believe that to be so. Instead, he hints that Karen likely already knows the answer to her question and was instead there to confirm her own suspicions that the person in the shadows was Deeze.

“You will have to enter Hell to solve your mystery.”

Both the demon in the painting and Anka give Karen the same clue: She must enter Hell to find the answer to her mystery. This is a metaphor for the torment and heartache that Karen will suffer if she genuinely wants to seek out the truth. Karen is brave and, taking the demon’s advice, does what is necessary to settle the questions that she has longed to answer.

“Deeze dragged me into a gangway and then just stood for a long time staring at me with this look on his face like he’d just really seen me for the very first time.”

Karen finally admits to someone out loud that she has romantic feelings for girls, not boys. The person she opens up to is her brother, and it comes soon after he admits to murdering Anka. After Deeze brings Karen in front of a mirror and tries to remind her that she is human, not a monster, she blurts out that she likes girls. Deeze accepts her admission, but because they live in 1968 America, he warns her not to tell anyone else. Still, Karen feels like she is finally seen for who she is by at least one person.

“I couldn’t sleep. I wandered our apartment in the darkness. I felt like I was copying everything into myself. Like I was ‘silly putty’ being pressed onto our life so that I could have the image in case everything changes…”

Karen has the sense that the end of her mother’s life is coming, and after Deeze’s admission of guilt, she worries about the future of her family. She tries to take in every little detail and remember every moment, so that she at least has the memories when this life becomes a thing of the past. It is only a few days later that Karen’s mother dies, and Karen’s world is altered forever. The foresight Karen shows demonstrates the arc of her coming of age as she prepares to lose her present state of living.

“When adults are haunted, it’s kids who get the worst frights…”

Adults carry the trauma and pain of their past experiences, and this trauma is put forward onto their children. Anka experiences this with her mother and the oppression of the Nazis, and Karen experiences this as she is exposed to her brother’s sex and drinking habits as well as his rage. When Martin Luther King, Jr. is shot and killed, the West Side of Chicago erupts in flames. The people are angry at the injustice of such a great man being murdered. Karen imagines what it must be like for the children who must walk to school in a neighborhood that is now a pile of ashes.

“The monsters who murdered Reverend King and the President were the worst monsters…Those are the kind of monsters who want no one to be free…”

Real life and imaginary monsters often mix in Karen’s world. She sees two different kinds of monsters: good ones and bad ones. The good ones just exist and may scare people but not intentionally. The bad monsters purposely keep people in a state of fear, so that they can be easily controlled. Karen believes that people like JFK and MLK stood for truth and justice, and when people like that are shot, it is a sign that good people do not stand a chance in a world of oppressive monsters.

“I finally understood why they do the stupid things they do. When you’re so close to finding out the truth…well the truth has a weight to it. And when you’re that attached to it, it’s almost like being roped to an anchor and tossed into deep water.”

Karen is close to finding out the truth about Deeze murdering Anka and feels like she is on the verge of doing something dramatic in the throes of this awakening. She is beyond waiting or sleuthing, instead confronting the issue head-on. Her introspection demonstrates her maturity and foreshadows the loss of security she will feel at Deeze’s admission to Anka’s murder.