Figures stand along the walls of a Maine basement with their faces to the brickwork, in the attitude of children sent to stand in a corner. They wear something long and black that hides whatever is underneath. They do not move while anybody is watching them. The woman who owns the house has known about them since she was four years old, and her mother and father never saw a thing. I Am the Monster Under the Bed by Emily Zinnikas offers this in the tone of somebody mentioning a draught from the skirting board, and that tone is the key to the whole novel.
A House That Was Never Empty
Willa Renfri Greene is thirty-two and sells paintings under a name that belongs to somebody else.
She grew up in Rapture, a small town in Maine with a forest at its back and a set of local rules nobody writes down. As a child she had a friend called Elliot who lived beneath her mattress and taught her to read. She had the veiled company in the cellar. She had the thing in the trees that answers a whistle, and she got into the habit of putting food out for it at night, the way other households throw salt over a shoulder.
I Am the Monster Under the Bed by Emily Zinnikas is clear that her parents found all of this humiliating. A reading group should sit with that early and not hurry past it, because everything the adult Willa does with other people begins there: a girl told from the beginning that her account of her own life was an embarrassment.
Six Headstones and a Survivor Nobody Wanted
At sixteen she was groomed by the school’s soccer coach, who collected six months of community service and a great deal of local sympathy. She collected a reputation. Two winters later she went to a party in a barn deep in the trees with six classmates, and she was the only one who came back.
No charges followed, and I Am the Monster Under the Bed by Emily Zinnikas is careful about why. She was a minor and the file was sealed. What followed instead was the chief of police naming her to reporters and never once taking it back, and fifteen years in which the town has been free to say whatever it likes.
The novel opens as that settlement breaks. A journalist called Joyce Kimura arrives at Willa’s door in Pennsylvania with a recorder running; the footage goes everywhere; a television psychic with a prime-time slot decides the case is his property. Then Willa’s old art teacher dies, and she drives north for the funeral and does not leave.
Reading I Am the Monster Under the Bed as a Book About Testimony
Read as a mystery, this is a decent one. Read as a book about testimony, it is considerably better.
Zinnikas never asks the reader to wonder whether the supernatural is genuine. Willa reports the veiled figures, the presence under the bed and the appetite in the forest as plain furniture, and the prose does not wink. The tension runs the other way entirely. The one part of her account that is ordinary, verifiable and true, that she walked away from the barn before it happened and found her friends afterwards, is the only part nobody will accept.
That inversion is the reason to put I Am the Monster Under the Bed by Emily Zinnikas in front of a group. The novel is precise about how victim blaming actually operates in a place where everybody has known everybody since infancy. There is no tribunal. There is a cashier who puts the change on the counter rather than in her hand. And there is a phrase, repeated for years, about what that girl did to that poor man. Zinnikas understands that a small town convicts by preference, not by proof, and that the sentence has no expiry date.
There is a second argument braided through it, and a group will want to pull the strands apart. The psychic, the documentary makers and the podcast audience all want the same commodity from Willa, and none of them is much troubled by whether she survives supplying it. The book is furious about this and does not disguise the fury.
Four Places I Am the Monster Under the Bed Slips
For all its strengths, this is a first novel and the joints show.
- The middle drifts. A long sequence of surveillance, renovation and small-town errands marks time while the plot waits for its final piece to arrive.
- The antagonist is drawn too broad. The celebrity psychic is very funny and thoroughly repellent, but he is turned up rather than developed, and the book asks him to carry more menace than his characterisation supports.
- The romance never gets fed. A transplant police officer is decent, patient and interested, and the thread gets perhaps eight pages of oxygen across four hundred.
- The final act explains at speed. A great deal of architecture is delivered quickly once the floor gives way, and the seams are visible.
Set against that, the closing stretch of I Am the Monster Under the Bed by Emily Zinnikas contains a reversal that reframes the previous three hundred pages, and a final page that is quietly vicious. Nobody will finish this book feeling neutral about it.
Questions Worth Arguing About
Begin with the coach, because the group will not agree. He has done his time, built a business, raised a daughter alone and is well liked by neighbours who know exactly what he was convicted of. The novel lets him be genuinely changed and genuinely unforgivable at once, and refuses to resolve the contradiction. Ask the table whether a person can be both, and ask who is entitled to decide.
Then ask about the feeding. Willa leaves meat at the edge of the trees the way other people avoid ladders, and she has organised fifteen years of her life around a duty nobody ever confirmed she owed. Ask whether that is faith, superstition or guilt management, and whether the difference matters to the person doing it.
Finally, ask the question the title is pushing at. I Am the Monster Under the Bed by Emily Zinnikas takes a woman who has been called a monster since she was seventeen and follows her to the point where she begins to find the word useful. Ask whether the ending reads as liberation or as the town finally getting what it asked for, and whether the book knows which one it thinks.
Groups who want more in this register should try Something in the Walls by Daisy Pearce, which puts a sceptical outsider and a hungry village in the same room. Heart of Glass by Jennifer Hillier is the sharper choice for a table that wants to argue about coerced confessions and towns that cannot afford the truth. Out of the Woods by Gregg Olsen covers the aftermath of an atrocity from the inside. And Stay Buried by Jennifer McMahon suits a group that wants the folklore and the ritual without the true-crime machinery.
Final Thoughts
The object that lingers is a pair of earrings.
They belonged to the art teacher, the one adult in Rapture who ever looked at Willa and saw a future rather than a liability, and they were a gift from her widower. Somebody destroys them. Somebody else repairs them: fresh resin, new wire, careful work. They do not look the way they looked before, and the woman who wears them to a memorial knows precisely which parts are original and which are not.
That is the book’s real subject in a single small thing. I Am the Monster Under the Bed by Emily Zinnikas is about what can be mended, what cannot, and how much of the original a person is allowed to keep. This is a first novel carried by a narrator worth the cover price by herself, and it ends on a note that will split any table it reaches. Bring it to a group in January. Nobody will want to walk home through the trees.