A lonely, middle-aged Margaret H. Atwood (not the author, she reminds us) is facing an imminent divorce from her pseudo-Casanova husband, Brian; a mind-numbing job at “the button factory;” and the impending doom of a workshop on workplace differences. She’s about ready to give up when a to-do list, her mother, a religious fanatic and some meddling aliens tweak her perspective. Taking an inventive approach to the omniscient narrator—trading the hackneyed device in for a troop of inquisitive aliens obsessed with humans—this unusual novel takes us inside the quirky minds of a sad little cast of characters whose mundane thoughts are comprised of those very things we’ve all thought and never said out loud. An overlooked gem,
The Love Monster is a deceptively simple story about simple people, and all of the monstrous forms that love comes in.