The Boy Who Drew Monsters

Written by Keith Donohue, The Boy Who Drew Monsters tries to insert discussions on parenting and autism in a horror story. The way it portrays Asperger’s Syndrome, however, is questionable, to say the least, and the fact that the overall narrative is marred by repetition, baffling characters, and artificial situations only makes things worse.

In the story, Jack Peter is a ten-year-old boy who has Asperger and Agoraphobia, living isolated with his parents in a house on the coast of Maine, in the United States. While his mother, Holly, works to support the family, the father, Tim, takes care of him. Jack’s only friend is Nick, a boy who was present when Jack suffered an accident on a beach three years before. One day, however, their problems go beyond dealing with Jack when strange events begin to occur: Tim encounters a strange creature on the road, Holly starts to listen to voices, and Nick finds the drowned corpses of his parents in the closet, although they are sleeping in the next room.

The supernatural elements in the novel clearly work as a metaphor for the difficulties of caring for someone from the autistic spectrum: just as Jack’s particularities are incomprehensible to those around him, so are the monsters he draws. It’s no wonder that the first time Tim sees a monstrous creature in the snow, the character himself makes this analogy, seeing in the monster what his son represents to him: an intangible problem.

The dynamic between the main characters is a fundamental point in the book. On the one hand, we have Jack’s mother, Holly, who maintains an almost hostile relationship with her son. For Holly, loving Jack doesn’t make the job of taking care of him any easier: at the beginning, for example, her son leaves a bruise on her face just because she got near him while he was sleeping – Jack also seems to suffer from something akin to night terrors. Her dilemma is a simple, but cruel one: she wants to love her son but knows that his existence makes her life much more difficult.

Tim, on the other hand, poses as a good father, always boasting a smile on his face while he lets Jack do whatever he wants. The problem is that Tim lives in denial, telling himself every day that his son is just like the others and that if he acts carefree all the problems in his life will suddenly disappear. His actions, therefore, move between selfishness – letting Holly become the “evil parent” – and gross irresponsibility – often letting Jack alone unsupervised.

Finally, Nick has a relationship with Jack that appears to be based on guilt: there is a veiled dread in his interactions with his friend that may hint at how Nick has something to hide and fears that the boy will do something against him.

Since the focus is not on Jack, but on the characters around him, the narrative prepares the ground for a discussion about the problems of taking care of someone from the autism spectrum. The story, however, seems to have nothing to say about the subject other than to show the difficulty: it prepares the ground for the discussion and then just leaves it at that.

The characters, for example, are rarely confronted about their behavior toward Jack. In a key scene, Nick considers a comment from Jack insensitive and cruel, but only because he doesn’t realize that the boy tends to take words literally – and he never learns that. Meanwhile, Tim remains in denial until the end, while Holly continues to be a bitter figure. In other words, they basically don’t have any character arcs, which is a special problem here.

As Jack’s perspective is only one of four and he himself does not reflect on his motivations for obvious reasons, the boy remains an enigmatic figure until the end. It’s his menacing image – he’s constantly portrayed as strange and frightening – that predominates in the narrative, never being sufficiently subverted. By inserting a real syndrome in a horror story, making it the main cause of the dreadful atmosphere is a tricky approach. If the final revelation moves towards humanizing Jack, it comes too late to be of any use, serving only as a twist: the point is more to offer a final “aha!” moment than to add to the book’s themes.

The horror scenes also fail to impress because they all share the same basic structure. First, the presence of some creature is suggested by some strange noises or shadows. The character in the scene gets terrified but tries to convince themselves that they are only imagining things.  At this point, a creature may or may not appear, sometimes just leaving traces of its presence in the house. This kind of scene works the first time it occurs, but its repetition removes the suspense. It doesn’t matter that the creature changes from scene to scene, sometimes being the ghosts of drowned people, deformed babies, a white monster, or even ghost seawater (?) if the construction of the scenes remains identical.

Even worse is to realize that the skepticism stage occurs even after the characters have witnessed several supernatural elements. The moment when Nick runs to Holly in a panic because there is a troop of zombie babies climbing the walls, and she dismisses the situation, claiming that the boy was just listening to the wind and imagining things, is particularly funny because she herself was listening to the voices of the babies and seriously cogitating the possibility of ghosts. Similarly, you can only wonder how many times Tim needs to see a scary white creature with humanoid traits lurking around his house to understand that there is indeed a scary white creature with humanoid traits lurking around his house and not a stray dog or a very random sheep.

There’s one moment near the end when he even decides to leave his son and Nick alone after seeing the white monster – it made him crash his car – instead of immediately returning to protect them. It’s one thing for the character to put his son at risk because he’s in denial of Jack’s particularities and treats him like any other ordinary child; it’s another, quite different thing to keep ignoring a giant monster lurking near his home. The metaphor is just too absurd to work – and it compares autism with monsters.

Holly and Tim’s complete disrespect for an Oriental lady only makes things worse. This lady, who also has Asperger’s, is, just like Jack, presented as a sinister figure in the narrative, even giving Holly a jump scare the first time she appears. Besides being heavily stereotyped – as an oriental she obviously knows the art of acupressure – the character also fits into a particular archetype of American horror stories, that of the foreigner who knows the supernatural and gives it a more otherworldly feel just by referring to it with foreign terms: saying “yurei” instead of “ghost”, for example.

Another particularly troublesome moment is when Tim enters the sea to remove a body when, two pages earlier, he was almost incapable of walking because his back hurt horribly – and it’s hard to think of a more artificial way to increase tension than to make a character’s back hurt suddenly.

Finally, it’s also a problem that the characters realize that the boy was drawing real monsters only at the climax as if it were a twist, stretching the suspense far beyond what was needed: the novel is titled The Boy Who Drew Monsters, after all.

The Boy Who Drew Monsters is flawed in a lot of ways: it has a repetitive structure, uninteresting characters, absurd scenes, and a very questionable central metaphor.

December 16, 2020.

Review originally published in Portuguese on October 17, 2017.