layout: post title: “The Monster Who Makes the Call” date: 2026-06-02 —

I’ve been reading while I write. Not to steal ideas — to understand what I’m trying to do.

A Monster Calls made me cry.

At first I thought the boy was the monster. He’s arrogant, one-sided, unable to see anything from anyone else’s perspective. He keeps telling the tree that its stories are pointless, meaningless. He’s insufferable in the way that grief makes people insufferable.

But the real monster — the one who makes the call — is the truth. Or more specifically, the fear of acknowledging it. And it doesn’t just live inside the boy. It spreads. The adults around him keep looking away, sugarcoating, pretending. Even his mother refuses to die. She keeps suffering, keeps holding on, because she doesn’t want him to feel the pain of losing her. She waits until he finally tells the truth — the thing he’s been too ashamed to say out loud — and only then does she let go.

I finished the book and sat with it for a while.

Then I realized I’d been writing the same story.

Ava isn’t trying to fix her father because she’s brave or strong. She’s trying to fix him because the alternative — accepting that some things can’t be fixed — is the truth she cannot say out loud. Palagos, the dark presence that follows her, isn’t a villain. He’s everything she hasn’t been willing to feel yet. Fear. Guilt. Anger. Shame. All of it compressed into one terrifying shape because she hasn’t let any of it be separate and real.

The monster doesn’t come to destroy her. It comes because she called it, whether she meant to or not.

That’s what A Monster Calls understood that I’m still learning how to write.