My Favorite Thing Is Monsters

Karen lives in uptown Chicago and relishes the deep artistic history there. She talks about the silent movies filmed there before Hollywood and has a neighbor who was an actress in them. She also visits the art museum regularly, and observes the varied characters that roam its streets, including a man with a beard that draws the length of the page, the monkey woman (who has a pet monkey), and “Jeffrey ‘The Brain’ Alvarez” (100). Karen goes to Sandy’s birthday party and finds Sandy alone in her house. She has no furniture and reveals that she sleeps on the floor and lives with her aunt and uncle (who are nowhere to be found) because her parents died. Karen gives Sandy a full gumball machine for her birthday, and Sandy eats and swallows every piece. Karen offers to take Sandy back to her house and feed her properly, and Sandy agrees. However, on their way back, they spot Mr. Chugg’s (a ventriloquist neighbor with a glass eye) dummies in the trash. Sandy finds a camera amongst the trash and takes a picture of her and Karen. She thanks Karen for the best birthday she ever had, and Karen watches as she seems to “float down the alley, as pale and feathery as a moth in moonlight” (104). When Karen enters her home, she finds out that her mother has cancer. Later that night, Karen goes into her mother’s room as she sleeps and makes her a promise to find the undead and become infected, so she can come home and do the same to her mother and Deeze and they can all live forever.

Karen goes for a walk and comes across two hippies holding peace signs. She finds the whole situation “phony” (113) because it cannot help her mother, her problems at school, Missy no longer being her friend, or the fact that Karen cannot turn into a monster. The hippies give Karen some magic brownies and tell her, “These will mellow you out detective” (114). She eats one and begins having a trip. She finds herself in a graveyard and hallucinates conversations with various dead women, many of whom were important detectives of the past, who lie there. They ask Karen what case she is working on, and she tells them all about Anka and a mysterious locked room that her mother has forbidden her to go into. One of these women hints that it may be a passage to an underground city of tunnels and tells Karen that they saw a man with a glass eye get taken down into another entrance to these tunnels, there in the cemetery. Karen explains her desire to turn herself and her family into monsters so they can live forever, and the ghost promises to keep an eye out for a monster who might be “recruiting” (122). When Karen gets home, she sees Deeze with another woman, and reveals that another reason she wants to be a monster is to escape what she calls “the night machine” (126), or the desire to have sex that seems to encompass much of adult life.

Instead of going inside her own apartment, Karen goes up to the spot where she used to draw outside Anka’s apartment. She finds Anka’s husband Sam in an altercation with a redheaded woman. Sam grabs her and Karen steps in, breaking apart the fight. Sam thanks her for bringing him back down to reality. Sam invites her into his apartment, and she nervously agrees. Karen draws Sam like Anka—with blue skin and a sad expression. He is pale and wrinkly from his life as a smoker. Sam reveals that he believes someone else was with Anka the night she died and plays a tape for Karen that he feels is a clue. On the tape is a testimonial from Anka, who reveals that her mother was a sex worker who regularly abused her. The cook at the brothel where they lived, Sonja, took care of Anka and told her stories, myths, and fairy tales. Anka tells of dark secret words that mothers tell their children which, as a result, mean that “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” (98).

Anka goes on with the story of her youth in 1930s Germany. She explains that when she got older, she was asked one day to deliver a package to a restaurant that she was previously forbidden from ever going to. When she gets there, she finds out that she is now being trafficked, just like her mother: “Not so fast! I paid for more than a box of carrots!” (98). Anka comes home with a fever, and Sonja nurses her back to health. She tells Anka about Hyacinthus, Apollo’s lover. When she is killed by Zephyr, he turns “his lover’s spilled blood into flowers” (152). Sonja’s mother becomes sick and loses her hair, blaming Sonja for it all—and she turns out to be right. Sonja is certain she will take revenge and tells Anka to put on a costume and they will leave together. Anka chooses a crow head and cape, in which she is depicted as wearing for the next few scenes. Anka finds Sonja in her garden, and bleeding from an attack by Anka’s mother, she passes away.

Anka is left to live with her bitter and sick mother but is almost immediately sold off to a man called “The Big Doctor” (159), who owns several young girls. Sonja calls them “keyhole girls” (160), inspired by a story Sonja used to tell her to keep her from peeping on people in the brothel: A girl spends much of her time gazing into keyholes, and with everything she sees, she loses her innocence. She ages rapidly and one day breaks into pieces. One of the girls, Dolly, molests Anka in her bed that night, explaining that The Big Doctor ordered her to teach Anka what she would be selling. Anka tries to protest but feels powerless to the situation. She gets slowly more miserable with each panel. Anka tells Dolly the story of Medusa, who was slain because she made men turn to stone. Anka says that Dolly tells her that her task is to cure men in the method they request, and that doing so will keep Anka “safe from the darkness” (182) in them. Anka goes to her first appointment, a man named Herr Schutz, and he spanks her but afterwards tells her to leave. Anka leaves confused, and that night, she finds that Dolly is sick. The next morning, the bed they lied in is covered in blood and Dolly is gone. The Big Doctor says she has gone off to recover privately and allows Anka to go see her. When Sam hears this part of Anka’s story over the tape recorder, he can take no more and passes out on the floor. Karen continues listening.

Anka arrives at an old Abbey where Dolly is supposedly recovering, but she soon finds out that Dolly is dead and that she herself is there to be sacrificed. Hooded figures stand over her as they lay her on a cold altar. One holds a dagger over her, and suddenly Anka sees Sonja’s face over her. The men around Anka faint, and Sonja tells Anka to run. As Anka runs through the halls, she sees a cloaked figure that looks like Dolly. Its hands are skeletal, and Anka knows it is not her. She testifies that “the thing followed me and sometimes I wonder if it has been following me all my life” (188). Anka feels led by the spirits of Sonja and Dolly to a house in the woods, who send her back out into the world soon after. Anka has nowhere to go and decides to go back to Herr Schutz. Although he rejects her at first, she takes a glass apple off the table and smashes it, appealing to his fetish for punishment. He then agrees to house Anka for a time. Schutz does his best to protect Anka, and even takes her to Berlin to see the symphony, museums, and opera houses.

Meanwhile, the Nazi regime is building power and Schutz expresses his approval of their ideals to Anka, who senses “something dark underneath their fervor” (200). Soon after, Schutz admits that although he loves Anka, he “prefers younger girls” (204), and gives her a letter of recommendation to go to university. Anka is on her own. One day, she is walking through the streets and a policeman hands her two yellow stars, instructing her to sew them to her clothing so people can identify her as Jewish. Anka remarks, “I’d always thought of myself as German first and foremost” (208), but Hitler’s Germany is looming over her. People who were once friendly in her new neighborhood begin treating her differently, and threats of being sent to a concentration camp become greater by the day. Anka explains that many non-Jewish people feared the Nazis and the mass oppression they brought as well. She remembers the sex workers at the brothel she grew up at, and laments that many sex workers were killed by Nazis during that time. Anka explains that these ladies taught her to “welcome disdained things” (212), much like the way Karen admires monsters.

Anka comes home one night to see the Gestapo on her building’s doorstep, and when an old typewriter is found (thought to be the belonging of someone Jewish), she and the others from the building are sent in a train to a labor camp. The train is crowded and there is no water to drink, but it reaches an area with snow eventually and one man volunteers to scoop snow for people to drink. As he does so, his hands become bloodied, and what was once a frantic train car becomes calm. Anka recalls that drinking “the water that tasted of coal smoke and blood” (222) gave her and the others courage for what they were about to face next.