The Isle of Blood (The Monstrumologist #3)

The Isle of Blood

The Monstrumologist (#3)

by Rick Yancey

Simon & Schuster, 2011

560 Pages

Young Adult (14-17)

 425 Harrington Lane is again set into turmoil with a late night delivery as Doctor Pellinore Xavier Warthrop is given the chance of a lifetime. In the third book in the Monstrumologist series, our favorite doctor of “aberrant biology” receives a mysterious package on a dark and stormy night that leads him and his assistant Will Henry on a quest to capture the one monster that has never before been seen. Not by anyone who lived to tell about it, anyway. With this object, a clue to the thing’s whereabouts, Doctor Warthrop would be guaranteed a place in history as the Monstrumologist who brought in the unattainable. And the game is afoot!

The source of the mysterious package is our old friend John Kearns, (who just might be Jack the Ripper). Kearns has just played a masterful yet exceedingly cruel prank on the agent of its delivery, who was told that he had been injected with a deadly poison called “tipota”.

In the end, Warthrop is unable to cure him, and we see first-hand what happens to those who touch the contents of the package, a thing the Monstrumologist calls a nidus, or nest, made of human bones and corporeal remains intricately woven together with what is referred to as pwdre ser, or “the rot of stars”. If touched, the star jelly on the nidus causes a toxic reaction far worse than death, as the victim’s skin grows thin, splits, and bony spines grow out of their face.

The house guest soon exhibits a hunger strong enough to begin eating himself. He runs amok, and attacks Will Henry. In the aftermath, Doctor Warthrop notices a scratch on Will Henry’s finger. Was it there before? The risk is too much. Will Henry loses his finger to Warthrop’s knife as the quest for the Typhoeus Magnificum begins!

Stored within those musty rooms were the things your parents told you were not real, floating in jars of formaldehyde or mummified behind thick glass, dismembered in drawers, disemboweled, flayed open, hanging from hooks, or stuffed like trophies borne back from a safari in hell.

The Professor immediately visits Abram von Helrung, the head of the Monstrumological Society to declare his intentions. There he meets a young student of monstrumology calling himself Thomas Arkwright (of the Long Island Arkwrights). Warthrop falls prey to his smooth talk and takes him on a journey to the UK to find Kearns, (and therefore the location where the nidus was discovered.) That was his big mistake. He thought he was leaving Will Henry behind for the boy’s good.

In his master’s absence, Will Henry stays with von Helrung’s niece, Emily Bates, who eventually makes him an offer of adoption; a normal life and a quality education at Exeter Academy. Not to mention his blossoming romance with her daughter Lilly. But his place is ever at Dr. Warthrop’s side.

Arkwright’s lie is discovered and at the behest of Will Henry, the hot-headed, booze-loving monstrumologist Jacob Torrance (that’s a familiar name…) is called in to turn up a few secrets. Kearns’ intricate and devious plan for Warthrop had apparently also included the involvement of the British Secret Service and the Russian Okhranka to boot.

Warthrop finally shows up after he is reported dead, a nameless patient locked in a British asylum. He requires the services of none other than Arthur Conan Doyle to free him (with some gratuitous, tongue-in-cheek taunting as Warthrop keeps saying “elementary!”) From there, The Monstrumologist and his assistant… nay, apprentice, try to stay ahead of the other factions, and on their way to the home of the Typhoeus Magnificum, we learn about Pellinore’s younger days: poetry, a Venetian romance, and a visit to Yemen where we run into the poet Arthur Rimbaud, awash in absynthe.

The premise of the story is simple. Warthrop and Will Henry go to get the monster. But the excessive story isn’t about what happens, it’s about the inner journey each of them makes, especially Will Henry. Warthrop talks of his bipolar disorder as “the dark tide” while Will Henry wrestles with his abandonment issues. In the beginning of the novel, nay… this epic, Warthrop alludes to his assistant as being his grounding, the silver thread to his own humanity, yet it is Will Henry who loses his innocence on the journey.

The book’s slow pace is an acceptable trade-off for its profoundly emotional characterization of the relationship between Warthrop and Will Henry. And there is Death. Lots of it. By the end, we have learned who the real monster is, the one beyond study, the true “King of the Monsters”.

And it rains blood.

Finally the party arrives at their destination: Socotra, The Isle of Blood. Warthrop worries, have the Russians beat him there? The island ends up being a deadly trap. Surrounded by hungry, fast zombies, with night vision Dr Warthrop calls Oculus Dei, and ammunition running thin, blood and body parts rain down from the sky. With the sound of a gunshot, they finally meet up with Kearns.

I pictured the Magnificum descending the mountainside, pale flesh glistening and covered in wickedly sharp spines, slathering maw agape,and dripping shining globs of pwdre ser, a black behemoth with twice the reach of a man and three times the height, and a face that was utterly blank, a face that was not a face, the faceless face that caused Pierre Lebroque to cry in the agony of perfect recognition, “Nullite! That is all it is! Nothing! nothing! nothing!”

Though the ending is predictable given such an impossible build-up, it is not a disappointment. On the journey, Kearns hunts a zombie he calls “The Minotaur” and the group rescues an infant, allowing a penitent pirate named Awaale to achieve his personal absolution. But alas, Will Henry is bitten. And these aren’t just movie zombies, they are deeply terrifying monsters. We’ve felt every aspect of their transformation. We know the unthinkable horror Will Henry is in for.

Desperate for more, I’ve already gotten the fourth and final book in Yancey’s series. But I can’t read it. That would mean my time with these characters would be over. And that is simply an unacceptable risk.