Monster- Frank Peretti

MONSTER

by

Frank Peretti

(June, 2000 12:00am Creede CO time/1:00 am Dallas time)

Well I finally finished Monster tonight! After three long weeks, and a 12 hour car ride to Creede CO, I got all the way through! I just haven’t had time to read  with my summer job! When I do, it’s only in small sporadic segments. It won’t take YOU three weeks to read this book; I’m just slow. It’s 419 pages, including the Epilogue, and there’s a super sweet interview with Frank Peretti after that which I still need to go back and read!

            Monster is a book by Frank Peretti ( author of This Present Darkness and The Oath) and one that I’ve wanted to read since I saw it for the first time last summer. It came out in 2005 or 2007, so it’s slightly older, but not ancient.

            It was a good read! Especially the beginning and the end. There were a few points in the middle where the same  thing kept happening over and over and over again and I was trying to decide if I really wanted to finish it, or just move on to a different book, but I had already put in 300 pgs worth, and mom said it got really good from that point on, so I stuck with it. And she was right! Once I reached pg 300 or so I couldn’t put it down! Plus, now I can say I’ve read a Frank Peretti book, and have sampled his writing style.

On his style: He can be pretty scary, obviously, as Christian thrillers are his genre. This book was one of the scarier books I’ve read in my life, which isn’t saying much since I never bother to read scary novels, but my mom, who has read a few of his other books, including monster, says that his other books are rediculously scary, as in having to do with demons and such- a theme I don’t do so well with.  Monster is supposedly one of his less scary novels, and considering, I still found it pretty intense. So I don’t think I’ll be reading This Present Darkness, or House (a Peretti+ Ted Dekker piece). 

             He is really good with figurative language and details, for example he has great imagery, metaphors and similies.

            However, I wouldn’t be truthful if I didn’t tell you that I almost quit reading it when mom told me that the book was about bigfoot. I thought “Ok seriously? This is a total turnoff”. Now, if you know me, you know that I have an interest in mythical creatures and far off places, however Bigfoot has never been an interest of mine.  This, coupled with the fact that there is a lot of science in the book to follow didn’t promise a fantastic read for me in the begining. By science, I mean as in forensic science which I’ve never really been into. For example, when CSI comes on I leave the room.  But I still decided to commited to the book, since I trust my mother’s oppinion of books and she told me to give it a chance.

            I tried to set that part of the story aside and focus on the other elements  of the novel which provoked my interest; the search for the main character, Beck, who gets lost, a couple’s love that  tries to defy the odds as well as men’s faithlessness. There were also the big picture elements of the novel which held promise: mystery, adventure, evolution vs. fatih, and faith in the unseen.   By the end, even the whole bigfoot theme caught my full interest thanks to the creative and personal way Peretti describes and presents the sasquatches. Yes, that’s plural. There are more than one.

            So, all in all,  it was definitely a good read! Obviously, not my all time favorite, but very creative, extremely suspenseful,  an unpredictable ending, and though it had some cheesy lines, the awesome imagery and inventive plot cancelled out any complaints I might have had about a few lines that could be seen as akward. J I like it. Go read it!