Monstrum, Lottie Mills
“Mills uses visceral, textured, and thematic prose with finesse and simplicity. Her mythological tales might be fleeting, but they spread themselves far and wide in the reader’s conscience.”
Monstrum proves that new talent Lottie Mills was a well deserving winner of the BBC Young Writer’s Award 2020. Writing from a lived experience of disability, Mills’ debut short story collection employs dark fantasy to cast light on the complexities of otherness.
Mills uses visceral, textured, and thematic prose with finesse and simplicity. Her mythological tales might be fleeting, but they spread themselves far and wide in the readers conscience. The White Lion follows an eccentric, exploitative circus master who preys on an unusual young girl for his freak show. The Toy Maker is a regretful manifestation of a mother’s perfectionism – of which her daughter, who cannot compete with her mother’s pristine doll creations, must endure. Meanwhile, Cuckoo is a beautiful, feral tale of a girl seemingly born from the ground itself, whose peculiar habits at first repulse, but soon inspire.
Mills’ tales possess urges towards wilder, fiercer entities, an imagination the author said has helped her in her own life to manage harmful assumptions of disability. A white lion, the healing earth, and the ocean tug the characters from the discomforts of their realities, posing a chance for escape and acceptance.
The Merman, a longer tale, merges every facet of the depths of the ocean to narrate the tale of a son long lost to sea, returning to land. More water than earth, he is met with hostility, aggression, and grotesque fascination by scientists and churchgoers alike. This tale feels strongly reminiscent, almost like a sister story of Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under The Sea, with its unsettling observance of the presence of the ocean in skin and flesh.
In her selection of tales, Mills explores the multiplicity of ways people view difference – their misunderstandings and fears, their prejudice and misguided interest, and also their kindness. The Mirror, in particular, seeps with familiarity, as if the character is seeing a version of themself in ways they wish to be viewed by society.
In the magical, gothic worlds of Monstrum, difference always wins. Those who feel that they are born outcasted or made so by society are, in the end, celebrated – even if only by finally celebrating themselves.
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