Mothers & Other Monsters: Stories [Paperback]

Maureen F. McHugh (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2006

* Story Prize finalist.
* A Book Sense Notable Book.

Nancy Pearl selected Mothers & Other Monsters as a "Books for a Rainy Day" on Morning Edition on NPR.

In her luminous, long-awaited debut collection, award-winning novelist Maureen F. McHugh wryly and delicately examines the impacts of social and technological shifts on families. Using beautiful, deceptively simple prose, she illuminates the relationship between parents and children and the expected and unexpected chasms that open between generations.

— A woman introduces her new lover to her late brother.
— A teenager is interviewed about her peer group's attitudes toward sex and baby boomers.
— A missing stepson sets a marriage on edge.
— Anthropologists visiting an isolated outpost mission are threatened by nomadic raiders.

McHugh's characters—her Alzheimers-afflicted parents or her smart and rebellious teenagers—are always recognizable: stubborn, human, and heartbreakingly real.

This new trade paperback edition has added material for book clubs and reading groups, including an interview with the author, book club questions and suggestions, and a reprint of Maureen's fabulous essay, "The Evil Stepmother."

Table of Contents

* Ancestor Money
* In the Air
* The Cost to Be Wise
* The Lincoln Train
* Interview: On Any Given Day
* Oversite
* Wicked
* Laika Comes Back Safe
* Presence
* Eight-Legged Story
* The Beast
* Nekropolis
* Frankenstein's Daughter

Reading Group Guide

* The Evil Stepmother: An Essay
* Author Interview
* Talking Points          

Reviews

"Gorgeously crafted stories."
—Nancy Pearl (Book Lust) on Morning Edition, "Books for a Rainy Day"

"My favorite thing about her is the wry, uncanny tenderness of her stories. She has the astonishing ability to put her finger on the sweet spot right between comedy and tragedy, that pinpoint that makes you catch your breath. You're not sure whether to laugh out loud or cry, and you end up doing both at once."
—Dan Chaon

"When I first read China Mountain Zhang many years ago, Maureen McHugh instantly became, as she has remained, one of my favorite writers. This collection is a welcome reminder of her power—they are resonant, wise, generous, sharp, transporting, and deeply, deeply moving. McHugh is enormously gifted; each of these stories is a gift."
—Karen Joy Fowler

"Wonderfully unpredictable stories, from the very funny to the very grim, by one of our best and bravest imaginative writers."
—Ursula K. Le Guin

"Enchanting, funny and fierce by turns —a wonderful collection!"
—Mary Doria Russell

"All the gorgeously crafted stories in Maureen McHugh's Mothers & Other Monsters have in common a profound understanding of the intricacies of human relationships, to which McHugh adds a touch of the fantastical. But here the fantastical seems so normal, so part of our everyday experience, that we simply accept McHugh's premises, odd as they might be when you consider them independently of the tales themselves. The adjective that best represents this collection is 'unsettling'. How else to describe stories in which a young woman meets a man she's attracted to at a dog obedience class and discovers that she dreads introducing him to her dead brother ("In the Air"); "Ancestor Money," in which a bequest entices a woman to leave her comfortable home in the afterlife for a visit to China; or "Laika Comes Back Safe," the story of two teenagers who are drawn together by the fact that both have unhappy home lives, but whose friendship is doomed because one is a werewolf. Whether it's alternative history that seems so real you start to question your own knowledge of the past ("The Lincoln Train") or a tale of the horrifying end of a utopian colony ("The Cost To Be Wise"), McHugh shows that what many people might dismiss initially as genre fiction can become transcendent in the right hands.
I was so impressed by these stories that I immediately went back and read McHugh's first novel, China Mountain Zhang, which I had somehow missed, and enjoyed it thoroughly."
—Nancy Pearl (Book Lust) on Morning Edition, "Books for a Rainy Day"

"Unpredictable and poetic work."
—Cleveland Plain Dealer (Recommended Summer Reading)

"[McHugh] cherry-picks subtle magical or futuristic elements from the expansive genre library."
—Angle

"McHugh's prose style is unique."
—Louisville Eccentric Observer

"McHugh is enormously talented.... [She] has a light touch, a gentle sense of a humor, and a keen wit."
—Strange Horizons

"There's not a single story that isn't strong, and most are brilliant."
—Ideomancer

"Clear, bright, and honest."
—New York Review of Science Fiction

"Each story in this collection meditates in its own, odd way on the dynamics of families and the vagaries of being human. "Ancestor Money"" considers the demands of the afterlife and the expectations of the living; "The Lincoln Train" describes an alternate ending to the U.S. Civil War, in which former slave owners are shipped westward on crowded trains. "Nekropolis," the germ of McHugh's novel of the same title, gives a slightly different flavor to the origins of the story common to both versions. Other stories occur in settings closer to the known world and the tensions of families in it. In "Eight-Legged Story," a stepmother comes to terms with being a replacement parent, and in "Frankenstein's Daughter," a woman deals with the health problems of her daughter's clone, while her teenage son tries to show off to his friends by shoplifting. McHugh's stories are hauntingly beautiful, driven by the difficult circumstances of their characters' lives—slices of life well worth reading and rereading."
—Booklist

"The 13 stories in McHugh's debut collection offer poignant and sometimes heartwrenching explorations of personal relationships and their transformative power. In "Presence," a woman helps her husband through an experimental therapy for his Alzheimer's disease and, by the story's end, is less his spouse than a nurturing mother to his developing personality. "In the Air" bridges three generations with its account of the different emotions a woman wrestles with as she anxiously tracks her wandering senile mother and her rebellious teenage daughter by means of biologically implanted homing devices. "Laika Comes Back Safe" represents so believably the feelings two school friends share about their lives in dysfunctional families that the revelation that one occasionally transforms into a werewolf seems entirely within the realm of possibility. Whether writing an alternate Civil War history in "The Lincoln Train" or a tale of extraterrestrial anthropology in "The Cost to Be Wise," McHugh (Nekropolis) relates her stories as slices of ordinary life whose simplicity masks an emotional intensity more often found in poetry. The universality of these tales should break them out to the wider audience they deserve."
—Publishers Weekly

"In this collection of stories, Maureen F. McHugh explores the subject of technology and identity, demonstrating that technology can only be a lens for what defines us as human, that is, our intimate relationship with the world around us and all the beings with whom we share that world. It is not technology which transforms us into monsters, but the danger of losing our s

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The 13 stories in McHugh's debut collection offer poignant and sometimes heartwrenching explorations of personal relationships and their transformative power. In "Presence," a woman helps her husband through an experimental therapy for his Alzheimer's disease and, by the story's end, is less his spouse than a nurturing mother to his developing personality. "In the Air" bridges three generations with its account of the different emotions a woman wrestles with as she anxiously tracks her wandering senile mother and her rebellious teenage daughter by means of biologically implanted homing devices. "Laika Comes Back Safe" represents so believably the feelings two school friends share about their lives in dysfunctional families that the revelation that one occasionally transforms into a werewolf seems entirely within the realm of possibility. Whether writing an alternate Civil War history in "The Lincoln Train" or a tale of extraterrestrial anthropology in "The Cost to Be Wise," McHugh (Nekropolis) relates her stories as slices of ordinary life whose simplicity masks an emotional intensity more often found in poetry. The universality of these tales should break them out to the wider audience they deserve.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Each story in this collection meditates in its own, odd way on the dynamics of families and the vagaries of being human. "Ancestor Money" considers the demands of the afterlife and the expectations of the living; "The Lincoln Train" describes an alternate ending to the U.S. Civil War, in which former slave owners are shipped westward on crowded trains. "Nekropolis," the germ of McHugh's novel of the same title, gives a slightly different flavor to the origins of the story common to both versions. Other stories occur in settings closer to the known world and the tensions of families in it. In "Eight-Legged Story," a stepmother comes to terms with being a replacement parent, and in "Frankenstein's Daughter," a woman deals with the health problems of her daughter's clone, while her teenage son tries to show off to his friends by shoplifting. McHugh's stories are hauntingly beautiful, driven by the difficult circumstances of their characters' lives--slices of life well worth reading and rereading. Regina Schroeder
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 271 pages
• Publisher: Small Beer Press; First Edition, Ex-Library edition (June 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1931520194
• ISBN-13: 978-1931520195
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #908,127 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Maureen F. McHugh has spent most of her life in Ohio, but has lived in New York City and, for a year, in Shijiazhuang, China. She is the author of four novels. Her first novel, China Mountain Zhang, won the Tiptree Award and her latest novel, Nekropolis, was a Book Sense 76 pick and a New York Times Editor's Choice. McHugh is working on two novels, BabyGoth and Coming of Age in America. BabyGoth is a mother-daughter story: the Ya-Ya Sisterhood meets Alcoholics Anonymous. Coming of Age in America is a near future coming of age story -- and a romance. Chloe is a trailer park girl at a nice college. Derek is a rejuvenated 72-year-old returning student. McHugh teaches writing at the John Carroll University in Cleveland and at the Imagination and Clarion workshops. She and her husband and two dogs used to live next to a dairy farm. Sometimes, in the summer, black and white Holsteins looked over the fence at them. Now she lives in Austin, Texas.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A balanced and pleasing collection of short stories, July 31, 2005

By 

Colin P. Lindsey (Manchester, NH) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mothers and Other Monsters (Hardcover)

Maureen McHugh has given me some really nice and thought-provoking reads in her novels over the past few years and I was pleased to see this collection of of short stories from her, most of which I had missed. I always approach short story collections with some trepidation.....when the stories are not on par with the writer's novels there is inevitable disappointment, and if the short stories are extremely good then there is still disappointment because the pleasure in reading them is so fleeting! However, every so often, there comes along a collection that does not fall into either trap and provides a haunting and lovely series of well-crafted little gems that are perfect in their own right. This is one such collection. I heartily recommend this one to anyone who has read McHugh in the past and enjoyed her works, and I invite those who haven't sampled her novels to test her writing first with these short stories. You won't be diasappointed with this one!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Mothers Aren't the Only Monsters, March 31, 2010

By 

Gregory Feeley (Hamden, Connecticut) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mothers & Other Monsters: Stories (Paperback)

The "Mothers" of the title occupy only the most recent stories in this, Maureen F. McHugh's first collection, which ranges over most of her career--the earliest story dates from 1992, while the latest is original to the volume--but is strongest in those published since 2001, stories that abjure future or alternate-history settings for a here-and-now (sometimes problematically so) in which women, most of them mothers (though again often problematically) seek to negotiate landscapes for which their lives thus far have left them unprepared.

The protagonist in "Eight-Legged Story" obsessively sees herself as a wicked stepmother, though she has in no way wronged the troubled, maddening boy who came with her marriage, which his problems are now unraveling. The mother in "Frankenstein's Daughter" has indeed done a great wrong, though she was driven to it by unbearable bereavement and with good intentions, which do nothing to prevent its awful consequences. Rachel, in "Ancestor Money," is long dead; she is impelled to travel across space and time because of a dubious gift made to her by a descendent--meaning that she too was once a mother, though the descendant appears to be an in-law. And the middle-aged narrator of "Presence," who must watch her slightly older husband descend into the abyss of Alzheimer's and then, following a radical treatment, climb a different path partway back, becomes something like a mother to her spouse.

Only in the most recent story, the two-page "Wicked" (McHugh now sticks the bad-stepmother theme on a pike and waves it before us), are we offered an outright Bad Mom, with a comic forthrightness that puts the reader squarely on her side. Do you think it's easy, McHugh seems to be saying, to be merely like this and not worse?

The motifs of mother and monster are sounded together and separately, then played through variations. The narrator of "Oversite" ("Renata paints pictures of girls hit by cars") is both mother and daughter, meaning she gets it in both directions, like the girls caught in traffic in her teenager's disturbing paintings. Grasping to hold onto her loved ones--her mother is slipping away into dementia, her daughter into something less easily defined--she has implanted both with a global tracking chip, an electronic trail of breadcrumbs. Does this make her bad? Her mother wanders, teenagers do reckless things, and the woman in the middle is responsible for both. The brave and plainly correct course of action, so confidently sought out in genre fiction, is in McHugh's work simply not available.

The older stories include her best-known, such as "The Cost to be Wise" and "Nekropolis," which became in time the opening sections of her most recent novels, and "The Lincoln Train," a Hugo winner. It would have been nice to see these stories in their own volume, filled out with other memorable early work such as "Protection" and "Whispers" (omitted here, presumably for reasons of space), and the more recent stories--shorter and even better, showing their own sibling resemblances, and less likely to have been nominated for awards--given a separate collection.

As it is, the thirteen stories here show their own unity--"We blinked in the darkness, holding our gifts," the devastating final line to "The Cost to be Wise," hovers like an epigraph over all of them--as well as a greater range than many Hugo laureates evince over an entire career. The earlier stories tend to be about daughters, and while their powerless state does not absolve them of moral responsibility--McHugh knows too much to suggest that--their moral choices and dilemmas are finally less anguished than those facing the older women in the later work. "Interview: On Any Given Day," published in 2001 and the last of the stories told from a youth's point of view, pointedly raises the issue in its final pages, where the relative moral culpability of an adolescent and an adult is presented with almost unbearable intensity. Reportedly the opening section of McHugh's current novel in progress (the practice of developing novels from the seeds of shorter works, common in commercial science fiction, is a sign of McHugh's genre origins), it make one look forward to the novel, and to more stories.

5.0 out of 5 stars Necessary Stuff, September 25, 2010

By 

J M McDermott (Benbrook, TX) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mothers & Other Monsters: Stories (Paperback)

Constructing plausible families is hard enough in prose-and rare enough-that this collection is a must-read. That these families teeter on the razor blade of dysfunction only makes the collection more thrilling. That these families struggle with technologies and mysticisms either familiar or unknown-clones and location chips versus jessing and nomadic settlers of distant planets-enhances the pressure-cookers exacerbating the human emotions of the moment, providing an artistic counterpoint to the themes of the story. The girl with the locator chip on her arm runs away from home, paints pictures of girls getting hit by cars presumably while they were crossing streets without looking. Excellent stories of our world and others, and a must-own collection for anyone interested in top-notch writing, regardless of genre.