John is down to the last few Withered and he’s got a lead. One thing leads to another and he ends up in another small midwestern town, working at a mortuary. Sound familiar? It’s a nice blend of old and new and works well as a conclusion for the series.

Eventually, the FBI show up and help to wrap up that storyline through the previous three books. We meet a handful of new Withered (including some surprising new powers) and get a bit more backstory. It doesn’t explain as much as I still want to know, but it’s more at least.

Following the disastrous ending of The Devil’s Only Friend, John and Brooke are out hunting Withered on their own.

On top of John’s sociopathy in the previous four books, we now have Brooke with a supernatural cousin of multiple personality disorder as she has to deal with the fallout of ten thousand years of Nobody’s memories and suicides. It’s also interesting to watch John try to figure out how to deal with this, both as a source of information in his hunt against the Withered but also as Brooke’s friend.

In The Devil’s Only Friend , John Cleaver is at it again. As I hoped, the story has moved away from Clayton County. This time around, John and Brooke– now with many of the memories and personalities of the demon (Cursed/Withered) Nobody–are part of an FBI task force tasked with hunting down and killing as many of the demons as they can.

It’s a cool way to take the story and I’m glad to see the change. I like seeing how John interacts with his new team members. It’s interesting that they’re all screwed up in their own ways, but they’re still trying to hunt something even worse. I wish we’d gotten a bit more depth on them before the end of the book, but it’s still a new situation to see John react to.

I died again last night.

Well. That’s a way to start a story.

Oof.

So at the end of Mr. Monster, John literally called up a demon and told them to bring it on. So of course there’s another serial killer in Clayton County.

“My favorite part of family togetherness is when we aspirate body cavities. What’s yours?”

Mr. Monster takes basically everything that was in I Am Not a Serial Killer and cranks it up another notch. Creepy supernatural serial killer? Check. Long detailed descriptions of embalming? Check. John trying and sort of succeeding in coming to terms with being a sociopath? Check.

Warning: This book contains some really dark imagery and supernatural elements. If either of those is not what you’re looking for, look elsewhere.

I first heard about the John Cleaver books while listening to the Writing Excuses podcast, which gave me a fairly good idea what I was getting into before I started it.