My Favorite Thing Is Monsters: A Proper Breakdown
Maggie Nelson's My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is a 544-page graphic novel written as a fake diary from 1968 Chicago. The protagonist is Renate Goldberger, a seventeen-year-old girl who spends her time drawing monsters and investigating the death of her upstairs neighbor, Karen Chow. It looks like a comic book on the surface, but the actual construction is what matters here. Nelson fills every single panel with inked drawings that reference real horror movie stills, old comic book art, and photographs. The visual style isn't arbitrary. It's built from decades of monster imagery repurposed into a continuous narrative. Most people encounter this book through the cover art and assume it's just a graphic novel about monsters. That's not wrong, but it misses the structural trick. Nelson pretends the entire book is Renate's notebook. Every page is meant to be a hand-drawn spread from a physical diary. The monsters aren't metaphors for trauma, though they function as them. They're also a genuine love letter to genre fiction and a way to examine how queer women process grief. The book contains essays embedded inside the diary format, discussions of feminism, and extended sequences that have almost nothing to do with the murder mystery. That structure is deliberate. Nelson wanted the book to feel like something you'd find in a real person's desk, not a polished novel. I remember digging into this when it first came out in 2017. The initial reaction online was mostly confusion. People kept asking whether it was a horror book or a literary fiction book. The answer is neither, which is the point. It's a hybrid that refuses to commit to one category. That refusal is what makes it useful for readers who want to understand how contemporary graphic narratives can operate outside traditional genre boundaries.
How to Approach Reading It
The most practical advice I can give is straightforward. Do not read this book straight through on the first pass. Nelson structures it so that certain spreads reward stopping and looking at them for a while. The opening sequence where Renate draws herself as Frankenstein's monster runs across several pages. Each panel has handwritten captions, references to Krown comics, and visual details that change meaning depending on which panel you compare them to. If you rush past it, you'll miss the escalation. There's also a sequence mid-book where Renate pastes actual photographs into the diary alongside her own drawings. I found this section confusing the first time I read it because the photos are grainy and small. They show real people in what appear to be vintage snapshots. Nelson uses them to blur the line between fiction and documented memory. The workaround is to simply slow down and treat those pages differently. They're not illustrations. They're meant to feel like evidence. One edge case that trips up a lot of readers involves the timeline. The diary is set in 1968, but Nelson writes from 2017 with full awareness of what happens after. Renate mentions events that haven't occurred yet in the diegetic timeline. This isn't a narrative error. Nelson is using anachronism intentionally to show how memory works. People don't remember things chronologically. They remember them in clusters, with future knowledge bleeding backward into past events. I've seen several readers write off the book as confusing because of this technique. It's not confusing. It's accurate to how human recollection actually functions.
The Monster Aesthetic Explained
The monsters in this book come from a specific lineage. You'll see Frankenstein's creature, the Wolf Man, Creature from the Black Lagoon, and various horror comic book figures redrawn in Nelson's style. But Nelson isn't just referencing pop culture. She's using the monster as a framework for examining queer identity and bodily autonomy. Renate explicitly connects her fascination with monsters to her own sense of being different. The creatures she draws are misfits. They're also beautiful in a way that mainstream horror usually denies them. Another layer most people skip is the feminist critique embedded in the monster imagery. Renate watches horror movies with her brother and comments on how female characters in those films are treated. Nelson extends this into the visual design. Several panels show Renate's drawings of female monsters that look powerful rather than frightening. The creature on page 279 is drawn with deliberate emphasis on strength and posture, not vulnerability. This is Nelson's way of saying the monster can be a positive identity marker, not just a symbol of fear.
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Where the Book Falls Short
I should note the limitations here. The book is long. At 544 pages it requires commitment. Some readers will find the diary format exhausting after a while because Nelson never lets the narrative momentum build in a traditional sense. There's no climax. The murder mystery plot remains unresolved for most of the book and gets very little payoff by the end. If you pick this up expecting a whodunit, you'll be frustrated. The mystery exists to give Renate something to do, not to provide closure. Another issue is the visual density. Every page is covered in ink. There are very few white spaces. For some readers this creates eye strain. The detail doesn't serve the story in every single panel. Nelson admits this herself by having Renate sometimes fill pages with drawings that go nowhere. That's part of the realism of the diary format. Real diaries contain filler. But from a purely narrative efficiency standpoint, the book could have been trimmed significantly without losing its core meaning.
Who Should Read This and Why
This book works best for readers interested in graphic narrative theory, queer literature, or the history of horror cinema. It's also valuable for people studying how contemporary artists remix existing visual culture. Nelson doesn't just reference old monster imagery. She reconstructs it, changes the context, and creates something new from the materials. That process is visible on almost every page. If you're coming to this book cold, I'd recommend watching a few classic Universal monster films beforehand. Not all of them, just the basics. Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, andCreature from the Black Lagoon will help you catch the visual references Nelson is playing with. The references aren't required reading, but they make the experience richer. You'll notice how Nelson edits and recontextualizes the source material rather than copying it directly. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters isn't a perfect book. It's deliberately unfinished in places, visually overwhelming, and narratively unconventional. That's exactly why it works. It refuses to follow established rules, and it does so with full awareness of what it's doing. Nelson knows the format, knows the genre, and knows how to break both. The result is something that feels genuine rather than calculated. That's harder to pull off than most people realize.
