How to Spot a Monster: A Field Guide for Girls

It's all about the hook and switch. The Monster hides in broad daylight, throwing lines, waiting for the bait to take root. When he catches you, it's either sink or swim.
 
Baited girls are hidden in the folds of every safe house, and the best way to escape is to beat The Monster at his own game--to throw your own line or hope you can escape without a hook pulling you back into the earth.
 
Written by Daniel Riddle Rodriguez, How to Spot a Monster: A Field Guide for Girls is a haunting chapbook collection that will capture you with its nonlinear storytelling, captivating voice, and creepy, yet realistic depiction of how the ones we thought we could trust can be the very same ones lurking in broad daylight, waiting for their first catch of the day.
 
 
How to Spot A Monster: A Field Guide for Girls introduces a talented new voice in the shadowy realms of transgressive wildlife stories. Zippy syntax alternating with exquisitely detailed descriptions of substance abuse — including choices people make to serve those substances— evoke time’s muddy distortions. I love how sex work and its socioemotional causes and effects here are examined with graphic clarity. Morality is a big whatever in these stories. Instead, grotesque takes center stage, hilarious and squeamish. Crafted candor and “study guide” meta-structures (field notes, homework, pop quizzes) invite slippery auto-fictional readings like early books by Denis Johnson, Hubert Selby Jr., David Wojnarowicz, William T. Vollman, Dennis Cooper, cut with Oakland street-smarts. The poetry, retrospective warning, dysfunctional family dynamic tracking, and acute rendering of settings is about sharing adventures in pain and pleasure, rolls scared-straight and no-regrets into one complicated ball.
—Trinie Dalton, Assistant Professor, University of California East Bay
 
 
ISBN:  979-8-9862523-0-8
44 pages 
Paperback, Perfect Bound