I finished A Monster Calls on a Tuesday evening in January, sitting at my kitchen table long after I meant to stop. It is a short listen at under four hours, but I needed to sit with it for a while after the final minutes ended. That is the kind of book Patrick Ness wrote here, built on an idea Siobhan Dowd left behind before she could write it herself, and it carries that inherited weight with extraordinary care.
The story is structurally simple. Conor O'Malley's mother is ill. He has a recurring nightmare he will not talk about. Then one night at seven minutes past midnight, a monster arrives, ancient and made of yew wood, and it tells him three stories, and then it demands one from him. The monster wants the truth. Conor already knows that the truth is the most terrifying thing the monster could possibly ask for.
The Verdict, Briefly
What Ness understands, and what makes this book land differently from most grief narratives, is that the hardest emotion in loss is not sadness but something murkier and less acceptable. The book refuses to let Conor perform the correct emotions. It forces him instead toward the thing he has been circling. The three stories the monster tells are structured like fairy tales, and like all genuine fairy tales they are morally uncomfortable. There is no reassuring lesson waiting at the end of each one. Ness uses that form brilliantly to prepare the reader for the larger confrontation the story is building toward. One reviewer who assigned it in a Year 9 English class described it as composed with beauty and nuance and noted that it moves readers who have experienced loss in ways that surprise even those approaching it as a classroom text.
What Makes A Monster Calls Worth Hearing
Jason Isaacs is not a narrator who softens material. His voice has a natural authority and darkness that suits the monster perfectly, but he does not play the whole book from that register. Conor's vulnerability comes through as something separate and fragile. The distance between how the monster speaks and how Conor experiences the world creates a tension that a lesser narrator would flatten by playing everything in one emotional key. Isaacs does not flatten it. He lets the contrast do its work. At just under four hours he maintains that tension throughout without a moment where the performance loses focus. This is the kind of short, concentrated listen that costs you almost no time and rearranges something in how you think about what stories are for.
Points to Consider
The three stories the monster tells deserve close attention. Each one seems to be about something other than what it is actually about. Ness has written them to destabilize your expectations about heroes and villains, justice and desire. They are not parables with clean lessons. They are the kind of stories that sit in the back of your mind for a while and mean something different when you return to them. Also worth noticing is the way Conor's relationship with time shifts across the book. His days at school, his grandmother's house, his mother's illness all have a dissociated quality that Ness renders with real precision. The nightmare Conor cannot speak about is present from page one, and the weight of that unsaid thing accumulates across every section until the final confrontation releases it.
The Right Listener for A Monster Calls
Anyone who has been close to a loss they have not fully processed will find this book difficult and necessary. It is classified as young adult but that classification undersells it. The emotional territory it covers belongs to no particular age. Teachers who have used it in classrooms report that students respond to it as genuine literature, meaning it gets inside them rather than past them. A reader in Australia who gave it five stars described it as a sad tale expertly told and a moving tribute to the original storyteller, which captures the dual nature of the book: it is both about grief and an act of grief itself, built on Siobhan Dowd's unwritten idea. Skip it if you are looking for plot momentum or worldbuilding. This is interior, slow, and precise. It asks for your full attention and gives you something real in return.
Key Details
- Voice: Jason Isaacs brings a deep, ancient gravity to the monster's voice while keeping Conor's interiority raw and present. At under four hours, he makes every minute count.
- Big ideas: Grief and the stories we tell to survive it, truth as the most frightening thing, love without the ability to fix
- Atmosphere: Quiet and devastating, like sitting with something you have been avoiding
- Worth it?: One of the rare audiobooks where the narrator and material are so precisely matched that the format becomes the definitive version.
