How to Make a Monster

How to Make a Monster is Frankenstein’s
unflinching memoir of growing up as a Black INTJ
13-year-old in 1980.
Conveyed as a bleak first-person narrative with darkly humorous
overtones, Casanova Frankenstein reveals how real-life experience
shaped his hard-bitten, survivalist view of life. His was
a world of fear and isolation punctuated by bullying thugs, the
stifling atmosphere of the Lutheran school on the South Side of
Chicago, racial segregation, unapproachable girls, and a home
life consisting of an emotionally distant and unsupportive mother
and a violent, alcoholic cop father who was not above giving his
son a good thrashing now and again while preaching Christian
family values. It is a searing portrait of an unbearably painful
upbringing.
How to Make a Monster is illustrated by Australian outsider artist Glenn Pearce
in a rare creative symbiosis in which Pearce captures Frankenstein’s inner turmoil
using a variety of artistic approaches ranging from naturalistic portraiture to outrageously
inventive phantasmagoric imagery. A seamlessly contrapuntal balancing
act between Frankenstein’s raw, unadorned writing and Pearce’s stunningly
detailed drawing.