How to Make a Monster

Plot

How to Make a Monster is Frankenstein's unflinching memoir of growing up as a Black INTJ 13-year-old in 1980.

Conveyed as a bleak first-person narrative with darkly humorous overtones, Casanova Frankenstein reveals how real-life experience shaped his hard-bitten, survivalist view of life. His was a world of fear and isolation punctuated by bullying thugs, the stifling atmosphere of the Lutheran school on the South Side of Chicago, racial segregation, unapproachable girls, and a home life consisting of an emotionally distant and unsupportive mother and a violent, alcoholic cop father who was not above giving his son a good thrashing now and again while preaching Christian family values. It is a searing portrait of an unbearably painful upbringing.

How to Make a Monster is illustrated by Australian outsider artist Glenn Pearce in a rare creative symbiosis in which Pearce captures Frankenstein's inner turmoil using a variety of artistic approaches ranging from naturalistic portraiture to outrageously inventive phantasmagoric imagery. A seamlessly contrapuntal balancing act between Frankenstein's raw, unadorned writing and Pearce's stunningly detailed drawing.