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Glimpse them chatting in a restaurant or posing on Instagram, and you might think they have it all. The pair live in London but often travel, drawing the eyes of other guests, their skin glowing, their limbs artfully at ease. She writes affirmations on hotel stationery; he claims to taste notes of bark and tobacco in his chianti. As Sean Gilbert’s dark, observant debut opens in Istanbul, this apparently perfect couple bicker and sweat, for secrets lurk behind their facade – and one of them might be murder.
An unexpected reunion gets their sightseeing off to a shaky start. The unnamed narrator and his wife, Elle, have not seen Benny for 15 years when they cross paths outside the Hagia Sophia. An irksome university acquaintance who has become a second-rate rapper, Benny has the grip of a limpet. As the trio browse stalls and pull on saliva-slicked shishas, talk turns to the past.
Gilbert intersperses his Istanbul chapters with flashbacks to their university years at Cambridge, where we see the three in the orbit of charismatic cad Raph, who shines at the debating society. Elle goes out with him and is betrayed. The narrator pretends indifference, but watches him like a hawk. Benny lusts after Raph, but tells himself he couldn’t possibly be gay. In exam season in his third year, Raph is found dead in a punt on the Cam from an apparent overdose, a bottle of Puligny-Montrachet in his right hand, a rotting picnic at his feet and a recording of Titus Andronicus blasting from a speaker.
The narrator is keen to get shot of Benny, but Elle is strangely reluctant to ditch him and the three end up on an excursion to a lonely Anatolian hostel, where gap year students strut their stuff and the tension becomes overwhelming. By now, Gilbert has detailed other traumas: a cruel sex tape, a disastrous social media post, a death in the family. We listen as the couple discuss violent urges – would they be able to bludgeon a nearby diner with a crowbar, or would poison work better? We learn that Raph confided in Benny before his death. But what does Benny know? And will the unhappy couple kill him for it?
Gilbert has produced a clammy story of obsession that recalls American Psycho and The Talented Mr Ripley. It never matches the heights of either, but this unsettling work is at its best when he zooms in on his dysfunctional couple. He has a fine ear for their snipping, chiding dialogue and shifting codependence. An endless rehearsal of glamour and happiness has caught up with them: their routines are empty, their kisses “strangely contractual”. He claims he cannot live without her; she downs Xanax and vodka and thrashes in the night.
No one here is happy: Gilbert’s thirtysomething trio exist in a world of shallow friendships in which families are cruel or absent. The younger group in the hostel are simply at an earlier point on the same road. Corporate work is grim (“You should love your cofounder more than your wife,” says one nearby digital nomad), but the attempts to satirise it, whether in Benny’s lumpen raps or tacky street art, fall flat. The book itself can struggle to make anything seem meaningful or appealing: Benny never overcomes his status as a bit-part player, while Raph, the apparently compelling catalyst of the Cambridge drama, feels devoid of charm or interest, and the university sections fall a little flat.
Yet for a book about going through the motions, I’ll Be The Monster builds up a head of steam. There are great set-pieces: the bravura opening, in which Elle watches porn in a hotel lobby, looking for a familiar face; Benny’s social suicide backstage at a gig; Raph’s final voyage. Above all, the relationship at the novel’s heart is rendered with a sure touch. The question of the couple’s guilt bubbles nicely throughout: the troubled pair are perfectly credible as both unhappy fantasists and grim psychopaths. Their crumbling relationship drives this absorbing debut: the perfect surface, the curdled underbelly, the desperation and disdain.
