Lindsay Starck’s Monsters We Have Made is a novel as unsettling as it is vividly told.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“Starck (Noah’s Wife) terrifies and captivates in this profound meditation on the power of stories that doubles as a twisty and possibly supernatural mystery. . . . Starck’s prose is by turns gorgeous and unsettling, creating a dreamlike tale that slides effortlessly between fantasy and reality as it interrogates such themes as forgiveness, generational trauma, and the responsibilities and burdens of motherhood. This is sure to resonate.””
In her own words, here is Lindsay Starck’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Monsters We Have Made:
Monsters We Have Made is a novel that follows a family in the aftermath of an unimaginable crime inspired by an Internet monster. The book explores the limits of family loyalty, the depths of love, and the shimmering boundary between fiction and reality. I’ve tried to choose songs that evoke the places and emotions that the characters keep returning to. The novel contains several different voices and styles, and I wanted to mirror that tonal variety here with different artists and moods. Lyrics are very important to me—so important, in fact, that I can’t listen to music while writing, unless it’s very quiet classical. If you see me with my headphones on, there’s a good chance that what I’m listening to is white noise.
I realize that this may not be the most upbeat playlist, at least on the surface—but there’s a lot of love here, even when that love isn’t easy. (Minor spoilers follow.)
“Carolina in My Mind” by James Taylor
Place is really important to the novel, and to the characters; the first half of the story takes place in North Carolina, where I lived for a while, and which is still very dear to me. There are so many lovely images in the song that could describe moments in the novel, as well: the sky “on fire,” the “silver tear,” the “highway calling.” And of course Sylvia, our heroine, is always casting her mind back over the past, searching for “signs that might be omens,” trying to see where she went wrong.
“Woke Up New” by The Mountain Goats
I imagine this song as the soundtrack that plays on the morning after Sylvia and Jack’s marriage has fallen apart. They wake up in separate spaces, alone, and move through their routines for the first time (making coffee, wandering through the house, turning up the heat) without the other one present. Near the end of the song, when the speaker feels the walls “close in” and he runs outside, the trees and the wind make him see how “the world, in its cold way, started coming alive”—and I’m reminded of all the moments in the novel when characters look at a branch or a shadow and see it, too, “coming alive.”
“The Mother” by Brandi Carlile
I find this song moving for its portrayal of a mother’s overwhelming love for her new child, even while that mother acknowledges all the ways in which her life has changed. Just as the speaker defines herself first and foremost as “the mother of Evangeline,” so too does Sylvia define herself as “the mother of Faye,” since motherhood was something she longed for ever since she was a child. Sylvia’s trajectory over the course of the book is shaped, above all, by her fierce and enduring love for her daughter.
“Dark Side of the Gym” by the National
Sylvia and Jack spend much of the novel remembering the early days of their romance and their marriage, and this song captures the beauty and hope of their love for each other before the Kingman, before the crime. As Sylvia remarks when we first meet her, lonely in her life after Jack, it is a “gift” for her to remember what her relationship once was.
“The Great Lakes Song” by Lee Murdock
Place, as mentioned above, is really important to the novel—the settings shape the characters’ imaginations and desires. The second half of the story moves from North Carolina into Minnesota, and Lake Superior lies at the center of the action. The folksy feel of this song reminds me, too, of something Jack might play on his truck radio.
“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by Gordon Lightfoot
Haunting, vivid, legendary—this song describes not only one of the most famous and devastating shipwrecks in recent Great Lakes history, but also the mythos and mystery of Lake Superior itself. It’s that very mythos and mystery that inspired me to set the Kingman’s castle (“Superior sings / in the rooms of her ice-water mansion”) on the lake.
“Letting You Go” by Jason Isbell
This song evokes a father’s sense of awe and wonder as he watches his child grow up. Like the speaker in the song (“when you started walking, I fight back the urge to stay right there beside you and keep you on your feet”), Jack wants to keep his family from harm and heartbreak and finds that the hardest part of love is knowing when to let go.
“It’s OK” by Tom Rosenthal
The speaker of “It’s OK” captures the twin themes of heartbreak and resilience that lie at the heart of the novel. The song communicates the loneliness of everyone whose life was touched by the Kingman crime but also the hope for forgiveness and connection in the future.
“It’s All Coming Back To Me Now” by Celine Dion
This is a song about returning to a past love, a past self, a past life—and I think it’s what we hope that Sylvia will find at the end of her journey. The song also reminds me of a wonderful former student of mine who was so excited to read the novel, and who passed away unexpectedly last year. I think he would have liked it. I love the confidence of this song, the speaker’s certainty about what she wants now, and her clear vision of the future toward which she is headed. This playlist has several somber moments, and I want it to end on a high note!
Lindsay Starck is a writer, editor, and professor based in Minneapolis. She studied at Yale, Notre Dame, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her first novel, Noah’s Wife, was published in 2016 by G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Her short prose has recently appeared in the New England Review, Ploughshares, the Bellevue Literary Review, The Cincinnati Review, and the Southern Review. Her academic articles have been published in Modern Fiction, The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, and Adaptation. When she’s not typing on her laptop (or taking pictures of it) she’s traveling with her husband or training their dog, Cedar.