Scary Monsters by Michelle de Kretser

Published 2022 · 70,177 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Postcolonial Literature, Modernist & Experimental Fiction

How hard is Scary Monsters to read?

Scary Monsters scores 57 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 52 out of 100
De Kretser weaves French phrases throughout without translation — harkis, fin de mois difficile, le centre historique, flick-flick — and the prose draws on a wide cultural vocabulary of names and allusions (Berger, de Beauvoir, Barthes, Althusser, Goya). The language is sophisticated but never obscure; readers may encounter unfamiliar French terms yet context and tone carry the meaning. Closer to The Great Gatsby than to Moby-Dick in lexical demand.
Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
Sentences are controlled and varied — medium-length with embedded clauses and parenthetical asides, but not Jamesian in their nesting. De Kretser favours clean declarative rhythms punctuated by deft aphoristic turns ('I valued my life at something less than a few francs'). The syntax rewards attention but never obstructs comprehension.
Abstraction: 60 out of 100
The novel is grounded in the concrete specifics of Montpellier 1980–81, but every scene carries ideological weight: the flea-market police check becomes a meditation on racisme, the staffroom lunch over steak frites becomes a collision between existentialism and solidarity. Abstract questions about who 'has history' and who only 'has lives' arise directly from observed incident rather than philosophical digression.
Information density: 65 out of 100
Every page loads cultural freight: the Yorkshire Ripper, the Althusser murder, the Spanish Civil War, the Sétif massacre, the Algerian war, Goya's Third of May, de Beauvoir's Marseille hikes, John Berger's Ways of Seeing. Readers who carry this context will find layered resonances; those without it will follow the surface story but miss significant dimensions. Denser than Normal People, lighter than 2666.
Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
Adult Lili narrates with retrospective clarity, explicitly noting what she failed to see at the time — the class gap with Minna, the racial dynamics with Jamal, the cost of her own fear. But much is left structurally implied: the precise nature of the threat from Rinaldi, the weight of her family's immigrant dread, the erotic charge between her and Nick. Readers must assemble what the narrator does not quite say.
Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
The Bowie song that gives the novel its title (and the Thin White Duke's admiration for Hitler) threads through the text as a resonant motif linking fascism, fear, and pop culture. Daring Audrey's prop gun, the spiral staircase built over a possible corpse, Candlewoman's Fresh from the Tomb appearance — these accrue symbolic charge without the novel ever becoming allegory. The symbolism is local and suggestive rather than systematic.
Ironic distance: 62 out of 100
The retrospective narration is shot through with self-irony: Lili catches herself performing Bold Intelligent Woman, calculates the racial arithmetic of gift-giving, and records her own cowardice with unflinching precision. The novel also deploys sustained satirical irony in the Gaston-et-Clothilde routines and the staffroom exchanges, where high-minded French discourse papers over colonial violence. Readers must read against the narrator's younger self as well as against the social pieties she lampoons.
Resolution withholding: 68 out of 100
The Rinaldi threat dissolves without explanation or confrontation; the question of Lili's feelings for Nick is neither acted on nor resolved; her friendship with Minna ends in an unfinished ellipsis rather than a rupture. The novel resists closure on its central preoccupations — who belongs, who is safe, what counts enough — leaving these explicitly open. Closer to Lolita's deliberate withholding than to the genre HEA.
Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
The novel uses a single retrospective first-person narrator recalling one year in Montpellier. The structure is roughly chronological, moving through seasonal time from September 1980 to the April ferry trip to Sardinia. No fragmentation, multiple POVs, or formal experiment — the complexity is in the voice and the layering of irony, not in structural innovation. Comparable to The Great Gatsby in its clean retrospective frame.

How Scary Monsters is regarded

Scary Monsters holds a literary regard score of 41 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where Scary Monsters sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (128 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Scary Monsters scores 84 out of 100. A second mythos, tragedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.2. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic
Chanel and I never feel more assimilated than when we wake up with headaches from the smell of paint or when an apprentice plumber is ensuring that our new sink will fail to drain.
Symbol: Formal
The French can overlook a whole heap of things if you’ve taken trouble with your shoes.
Mythos: Irony vi (Visio malefica) (irony vi)
‘Dignity, choice and speed,’ repeated the minister.
Genre: Confession + Novel + Anatomy
That’s why I’m sitting in The Coffee Spot today, going over everything: in the hope that my journey to this point will become clear.

Where the story of Scary Monsters takes place

  • Montpellier, France, 1981, the main setting
  • Montpellier, France, September 1980-May 1981 (1980 to 1981)
  • Genoa and Sardinia, April 1981
  • Oxford and Paris, 1981-1983 (epilogue) (1981 to 1983)
  • Near-future Melbourne under the Amendment and the repatriation laws

5 things that are true of Scary Monsters, with the passage for each

  1. The narrator and Minna are twenty-two and twenty, and the year is 1981.

    I was twenty-two and Minna was twenty and it was 1981.

  2. Lili's furnished flat in a building dated 1703 costs seven hundred francs a month.

    The apartment cost seven hundred francs a month, more than I’d hoped to pay

  3. When Lili reports an electric shock from the tiled shower wall, her landlord tells her not to take showers.

    ‘In that case, mademoiselle, don’t take showers.’

  4. On the Paris train, a newspaper reports that the woman Lili and Minna called the Most Beautiful Woman in France has been found murdered near Clarensac.

    A journalist informed me that Marianne Sagara’s mutilated body had been found on wasteland near a village forty kilometres from Montpellier.

  5. In the second novella the narrator edits a police spreadsheet to change his cousin-in-law Bram's tax-evasion flag from yellow to white.

    I keyed in Russ’s password, which enabled me to edit the spreadsheet, and changed Bram’s code from yellow to white.

Scenes in Scary Monsters that Frye would name

54 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Anagnorisis, untitled
It was the beginning for me of thinking about why some people had history and other people had lives. The recognition that gives the book its thematic axis.
Sparagmos, untitled
Marianne Sagara’s mutilated body had been found on wasteland near a village forty kilometres from Montpellier. The first half closes on a dismembered, scapegoated victim.
Pathos, untitled
He looked so gallant, trotting towards death with its cheerful colours taped to his leg. Alan's euthanasia is the sacrificial scene that prefigures Ivy's.
Pharmakos, untitled
If you’re not wanted, better a quick end. Ivy, the unwanted old woman, is marked for ritual disposal by her family and state.
Pathos, untitled
he’ll administer an injection. Ivy’s heart will stop. Ivy's death is a planned ritual sacrifice staged as a party.
Pharmakos, untitled
It always ended the same way, with a group of North African men herded into a van. The gendarmes' sweeps make North African men the ritually expelled scapegoats of Montpellier.

Books that share these scenes with Scary Monsters

About the author

Michelle de Kretser