Favorite Authors

Tuesday, September 9, 2025

Bad Monkeys

 Fiction by Matt Ruff


Jane Charlotte has been arrested for murder, and she's being interviewed by a psychiatrist when she makes some startling claims. Jane says she's been employed by a worldwide organization who is tasked with fighting evil by identifying and removing it. Specifically, Jane claims to be an assassin for the unnamed organization; she says she kills Bad Monkeys, that is, people who are deemed irredeemably evil and dangerous to others.

This is an interesting beginning, and the book starts out really good. Unfortunately there are so many unbelievable plot twists, and Jane is such an unreliable narrator, that I ended up unsure at the end of the story what had really happened. The novel gave me a bad case of I-Can-No-Longer-Suspend-My-Disbelief-Syndrome.**

**I-Can-No-Longer-Suspend-My-Disbelief-Syndrome: 

(See The Truth About the Accident by Nicole Trope)

This is when the plot twists push the boundaries of believability too far, (such as a long-lost-identical twin showing up at the last minute to take the blame when it had never before been mentioned that the person has a twin) or too often (such as three or four coincidences lining up to reveal the final twist.)

No comments:

Post a Comment