A Monster Calls

What's inside (8 sections)

1. Conor O'Malley at 12:07
2. The First Tale of the Queen
3. The Apothecary and the Parson
4. To Be Seen
5. The Nightmare Spoken Aloud
6. What Holds and What Hurts
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

I picked up A Monster Calls because it looked quick. The Walker Books first edition from 2011 runs 214 pages, and much of that space belongs to Jim Kay's dark illustrations. I thought I would finish it in an evening and move on. Instead I sat with it longer than books three times its size. Patrick Ness wrote it from an original idea by Siobhan Dowd, who died of cancer before she could write it herself, with illustrations by Jim Kay. That origin is printed plainly on the cover, and it matters for how the story feels. It does not read like a fantasy that uses illness as background. It reads like a book about a boy losing his mother that uses fantasy because plain language fails him.

Conor O'Malley is thirteen and living in England with his mum while she goes through treatment for cancer. His father lives in America with a new family and calls when he can, which is not often enough to help. Plans are being made, half spoken, for Conor to live with his grandmother if things get worse. School has turned thin and cold. He has drifted from his old friend Lily, and a boy named Harry leads the picking on him with that calm, watchful cruelty some teenagers learn early. At home Conor tries to be capable. He cooks a little, cleans a little, keeps track of medicine times. At night he has the same nightmare, the one with darkness and wind and screaming, and he wakes afraid to say what happened in it.

Then at 12:07, seven minutes past midnight, the yew tree on the hill behind the churchyard starts to move. Branches pull into arms and legs and a huge face. Leaves shape a voice. The monster has come walking, and it says Conor called it. Conor is not scared in the way the monster expects, which interests the monster. It says it is old, a version of the Green Man, and that it will tell three stories. After the three stories, Conor must tell a fourth, his own truth. That deal sets the shape of the book. Between stories we stay in Conor's day life. Between day scenes, the monster talks.

What I did not expect was how little comfort the monster offers. It does not soothe. It does not explain treatment or promise recovery. It tells messy stories and lets Conor get angry at them. Kay's pictures help here. The monster is all bark lines and smoke. Houses tilt. Figures stretch. Black ink takes up whole pages. You can tell this was made to be looked at slowly, not skimmed.

Conor O'Malley at 12:07

Conor starts the book tired in a way sleep does not fix. His mum has been ill for about a year, and the treatments have changed the house. There are extra blankets on the sofa. There is a careful way she moves. There are days that seem almost normal and then days when she cannot get up. Conor tells himself stories about the medicine working if they find the right dose. The adults around him speak softly and leave gaps. His grandmother arrives with lists and a brisk manner that Conor reads as cold. She wants the floors clean and the fridge stocked. She talks about selling things or painting rooms. Conor hears control where she means care, and they grate on each other from the first visit.

His father phones from America and once flies over for a short visit that leaves Conor emptier. The dad is kind in flashes but distant in decisions. He talks about his new life and his new family and Conor listens for a place for himself in those sentences and does not quite find it. The trip to the seaside or the meal out feels like proof that love has limits. Conor does not say this outright. He goes quiet, which adults often mistake for coping.

School is no refuge. Lily once tried to stay close after Conor's mum got sick, and Conor pushed her away because pity felt worse than loneliness. Harry and his circle noticed the gap. They do not hit Conor every day. They ignore him in a studied way, then single him out when teachers look elsewhere. Conor finds he almost prefers a punch to being unseen, because at least pain is clear. That feeling will matter later when the monster tells the third story.

The nightmare sits under all of this. Conor will not describe it at first. We learn only pieces. Hands slipping. Falling. Someone crying out. He wakes sweating and checks the clock. The monster comes at the same minute each time, 12:07, and that repetition gives Conor something to hold. Whatever else is falling apart, the monster keeps appointments.

The monster itself is worth picturing. It is not a soft tree spirit. It is yew, a tree tied in Britain to churchyards and to medicine and poison both. Its voice is rough. It breaks windows by breathing near them. It has seen whole villages rise and fall. It tells Conor that it has come to heal, though not in the way Conor hopes. That line confused me on first read. I wanted healing to mean cure. The book means something else, and it takes its time getting there.

The First Tale of the Queen

The monster's first story sounds like a fairy tale and then turns. There was once a king who lost his sons in battles and plague and was left with only a grandson. Old and tired, the king married again, a young woman from a far place who knew herbs and kept to herself. Villagers called her a witch because that is what frightened people do with a strange young queen. When the king died before the prince came of age, the queen ruled as regent. By the monster's telling, she ruled well. She kept grain stored. She kept quarrels from turning to blood. But she did not want to give up the throne when the prince grew old enough to claim it, and she planned to marry him to keep her place.

The prince loved someone else, a farmer's daughter his own age. The two ran away together to marry across the border and wait until time gave him the crown without a fight. They slept one night under the yew tree. In the morning the girl was dead, stabbed, and the prince was covered in her blood. He told the villages that the queen had done it from jealousy, to keep him unwed and keep power. People believed him because they already feared her. They marched with torches. The monster walked with them, huge among small men. They took the queen to burn.

Then the monster did something Conor did not expect. It lifted the queen from the fire and carried her away to live out her life far from that kingdom. She was hard and proud and not innocent in her hunger for power, the monster says, but she was not a murderer. The prince had killed his love himself under the yew tree, to give his people a reason to rise for him. He then lied to himself so fully that he believed his own tale.

Conor hates this story. He calls it unfair. He wanted the queen punished because she was a witch and witches in stories get punished. The monster answers that the world does not split cleanly into witches and princes. People hold two truths at once. The prince loved the girl and killed her. The queen was selfish and innocent of that death. Villagers wanted a simple enemy and chose one.

For a children's book, that is a lot to ask. I sat a while after this chapter. Conor wants stories to tell him who to blame so he can blame someone for his mum being sick. The monster refuses. That refusal is the point, though it feels cruel in the moment. The monster will not let Conor use tales as escape. It wants him to think about how people lie to themselves to keep going, including decent people, including scared thirteen year olds.

The Apothecary and the Parson

The second story moves closer to home. In a village near the yew, there lived an apothecary who used old ways, bark and berries and poultices, and who was greedy and rude besides. He wanted to cut the yew for medicine. A parson in the same parish preached against him and told people to keep to prayer and to newer doctors, and the apothecary lost custom and grew bitter. Then a sickness came. The parson's two daughters caught it. When every prayer and powder failed, the parson went in secret to the apothecary and begged for help. The apothecary asked why he should help a man who had ruined him and kept the yew from him, the best source of cure he had. The parson promised belief. He said he would give the yew and send the parish to the apothecary's door if only the girls lived. The apothecary said he could not help now, that belief given only as a bargain was too late, and the girls died.

As punishment, or as lesson, the monster tore the parson's house to the ground, timber by timber. Conor rides along inside the destruction in a kind of dream strength, shouting while the monster pulls. When he wakes, he finds he has wrecked his grandmother's sitting room for real. The clock his grandfather kept, the ornaments lined with care, the sofa, all broken. His hands ache. His grandmother stands in the doorway and does not scream, which somehow makes it worse.

This is the hardest section to read as an adult because both men are at fault and neither child can fix it. The apothecary was a healer who let spite win. The parson kept faith lightly, changing it when fear pressed him, and his scorn cost lives before his own loss. The monster sides with the prickly healer over the smooth preacher, not because greed is good but because skill used for others counts more than fine words. Conor does not grasp that yet. He only knows he broke things he cannot mend and expects to be cast out.

His grandmother surprises him. She cleans up without a long lecture and pays for the damage in quiet. Later we learn more about why she keeps order so fiercely. Her own life has taught her that rooms you can tidy are easier than bodies you cannot heal. I found those small beats more moving than the house breaking. Anyone who has sat with a sick parent or child knows the pull toward chores. Washing cups feels possible when waiting for test results does not.

At school the fallout grows. Teachers treat Conor as fragile and stop asking for homework. Classmates keep distance. Harry keeps watching. Conor's anger builds because no one will meet him straight. The monster keeps its own time and returns at 12:07, neither early nor late, to tell the next tale.

To Be Seen

The third story is the shortest and, for me, the strangest on first pass. The monster tells of a man who was invisible, not by spell but by habit. People looked past him every day. Tired of being unseen, he called the monster. The monster made people see him. Then the man learned that being seen can hurt more than being missed.

The meaning lands in the school dining hall. Harry has been needling Conor with that flat, bored tone. Lily tries once to step in and Conor snaps at her, which isolates him further. One lunch, with the monster's voice hot in his ears, Conor lets go and attacks Harry so hard that teeth loosen and the boy ends up in hospital. For a page or two Conor feels strong inside the monster's limbs. Then the bell rings, so to speak, and he is a boy again with sore knuckles and a sick feeling, called to the head's office while teachers whisper about stress and grief.

This part will upset some readers, and it should be named. The book does not present the beating as triumph. It shows Conor wanting punishment and wanting notice at once, and getting both in a form that shames him. Harry, who had kept Conor invisible by agreement among peers, now sees him as dangerous. Teachers now see him as a problem to manage gently. Neither kind of seeing helps. Conor wanted someone to say plainly that his mum is dying and that he is furious about it. Instead he gets careful voices and extra time on assignments.

I think Ness gets school right here. Illness in a family can make a teenager socially odd to others. Friends do not know what to say, so they say nothing. Bullies sense the silence and fill it. Adults praise resilience because they need to believe children bend without breaking. Conor bends and bends. The monster is the only figure that does not flatter him. It tells him his anger is real and also not the whole truth, and Conor cannot stand hearing that yet.

Kay's art turns harsh in these pages. Faces crowd. The monster looms over rooftops. Ink seems to press from the edges toward Conor's small shape. If you read with a child, pause here. Ask what Conor wanted from that fight. Ask what else he could have done with shaking hands and a loud heart. The book leaves room for that talk without preaching.

The Nightmare Spoken Aloud

After the three tales, the monster asks for Conor's story. Conor refuses. He says he has no story, that he is tired, that the tales proved nothing. The monster grows hotter and tells him he must speak or be held in fire. What follows is not a tale with kings or parsons. It is the nightmare Conor has carried since his mum's illness turned grave.

In the dream, Conor stands on a cliff edge holding his mum's hands while she slips. Below is dark. Wind pulls. She is light now from sickness and fear, and still too heavy to hold forever. Conor grips and grips, arms burning, and then, to his horror, he lets go. Sometimes in the dream he thinks he lets go on purpose. He wakes screaming before she lands, and the scream is his own.

Telling it takes pages. The monster does not let him soften the words. Conor finally says the thing he has hidden even from himself. He wishes it would end. He loves his mum with everything he has, and he cannot bear the waiting, the hope that lifts and drops, the nights listening for her breath, the days pretending at school. Part of him wants her to die so the pain stops, for her and for him, and that want feels like murder. He believes this want makes him a bad son who deserves to be left alone.

The monster holds steady through this. It says, in its old voice, that Conor's truth is human. Wanting an end to suffering does not cancel love. Love and selfish relief can live in one chest. Conor held on because he loves her. He let go in the dream because he is tired and she is tired and potency has limits. Both are true. This is the healing the monster promised at the start, not a cure but a naming.

What comes after is quiet. His grandmother finds him where he has fallen and drives him to the hospital. His father has come back and sits awkwardly, trying and failing to be enough. Lily's mum, who has helped more than Conor admitted, is there too. Conor climbs onto his mum's bed and holds her hand. They talk in short sentences. She tells him she is sorry she has to go. He tells her he knows. She dies at 12:07, the monster's minute, while the yew stands outside somewhere beyond the hospital walls.

I cried here, plainly. Ness does not dress the death in light or music. Machines beep. Hands cool. A nurse waits by the door. Grief in this book is bodily and practical. There are forms to sign and people to call and a grandmother who makes tea too strong. Handling it this way respects young readers. It says dying is not a puzzle you solve by being good. It is a thing that happens while you keep breathing and holding.

What Holds and What Hurts

A Monster Calls won the Carnegie Medal for writing and the Kate Greenaway Medal for illustration in 2012, the only book to take both in the same year, plus children's book prizes voted by readers and booksellers. The film from 2016, directed by J. A. Bayona from Ness's own script, with Liam Neeson voicing the monster, and the stage version that followed, brought the story to people who never pick up middle grade books. Those adaptations keep the 12:07 visits and the cliff dream because those are the load bearing parts. Cut them and the story falls.

What holds strongest, years on, is the refusal to moralize grief. Conor is not rewarded for good behavior. His mum does not live because he confesses. The monster does not stay as a pet guide. It leaves when its work is done, as old things do. The grandmother, who seemed stiff at the start, becomes one of the most tender figures by the end, a woman learning to mother her daughter's son while mourning her daughter. The father remains limited, which feels honest. Some parents cannot cross oceans of their own making, even for a kind child.

A fair criticism belongs here too. The book is short and its pattern shows. Night visit, day trouble, tale, anger, repeat, then the truth. Readers who want plot surprises may guess the shape early. The middle school scenes lean on types, the bully, the lost friend, the kind teacher glimpsed at edges, and those who want full lives for Lily or Harry will not get them. The tales themselves read simply by design, closer to fable than to novel chapters, and that simplicity can feel thin if you come for world building. The illustrations, strong as they are, make some spreads very dark, which suits night visits but can tire eyes late at night.

Who is it for, then. I would give it to readers around eleven and up, and to any teenager living near illness, with room to talk after. It is not only for children. Adults who have sat in hospital chairs will find it exact about waiting and about the shameful wish for an end. Read it in two or three sittings, not in sips. Let the tales land whole. If you read alongside a young person, agree before the last forty pages that you can stop and come back. The cliff scene and the hospital goodbye are direct and may shake sensitive readers. That is not a flaw, but it asks for care.

Practical notes help close the facts. First published in the United Kingdom by Walker Books in 2011. The standard hardcover runs 214 pages and carries ISBN 9781406311525. The American edition from Candlewick Press uses ISBN 9780763655594 and similar pagination. Look for Jim Kay's name on the cover beside Ness and Dowd. His pictures are part of the telling, not decoration. Libraries often shelve it in young adult or in middle grade fantasy, and both fit.

I finished the book thinking less about monsters than about hands. Conor holding on, Conor letting go, his grandmother washing broken china, his mum's hand cooling in his. The yew stands through all of it, poisonous and useful, old beyond any one family. The monster does not take Conor's sorrow away. It gives him words that fit the shape of it. Truth spoken, grief shared, love kept even as life ends. For a short book with pictures, that is plenty, and it explains why this story keeps finding new readers.

FAQ

When was A Monster Calls published and who published it?

Walker Books first published it in the United Kingdom on 5 May 2011. The standard hardcover runs 214 pages with ISBN 9781406311525.

Who are Siobhan Dowd and Jim Kay in relation to the book?

Dowd conceived the idea while ill with cancer and died in 2007 before writing it. Ness wrote the novel from her idea and Kay created the illustrations.

Is A Monster Calls only for young children?

No. It suits readers around eleven and up, plus teens and adults near illness. The cliff nightmare and hospital goodbye are direct, so sensitive readers benefit from pauses and talk.