Title: Loving the Monster Within
Author; Cassidy K. O'Connor
Date: 2016
Quote: "I believe we are all beautiful disasters and deserve to find someone to love the monster within each of us."
But the metaphor her writing group chose for this pleasing thought goes farther onto the dark side than many readers want. Penelope falls in love with a gargoyle. We see gargoyles as silly cartoon-type figures, and some recent fiction about them presents them that way, but Penelope's gargoyle imprisons the spirit of a long dead Frenchman who sold his soul to a demon and spent years in Hell where he was forced to torture other lost souls. In order to keep him Penelope will have to climb into bed with the demon. Will she do with him what she's spelled out in graphic detail having done with the ex-gargoyle, already, before marriage--or can she kill him?
If these metaphors for working through the problems in a relationship don't put you off, then this book might be for you, and yes, there is the obligatory series of sequels. My feeling is that couples already know that we all have monsters within us, and can tame those monsters more efficiently by learning effective ways to communicate to each other's Outer Adult without triggering the monstrous Inner Child. We weren't tortured by demons, or even criminally abused by older people; we just learned the wrong approaches to what we want to accomplish. More than we need to fantasize about torture, prostitution, or murder, we need to realign our expectations of each other and practice better language behavior. And scrubbing bathroom floors after standing over toilets. And giving adults a reasonable time frame to accomplish a task rather than fussing and clucking and nagging until they're locked so firmly into rebellion-through-procrastination that the task never gets done... Maybe that's just me.
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