The Cairndale Institute is extremely secretive—so secretive that even their own agents aren’t told the whole story most of the time. The ostensible mission of the Institute is to find talented children and teach them how to use their abilities, as well as blend into society. That’s the official mission but, as J.M. Miro’s Ordinary Monsters gets rolling, a lot of people are going to learn a lot of troubling things about what the Institute is really up to.
Many characters take turns narrating Ordinary Monsters. Charlie Ovid is one of the talented children the Institute recruits, rescued from horrific torture by Alice Quicke and her partner, Frank Coulton. Alice gets to tell her part of the tale, too. Meanwhile, interstitial chapters spotlight two characters who may or may not be the primary villains. (There’s a strong possibility that both of these characters are the villains, just with different agendas.) We also briefly get to hear from two women who helped raise Marlowe, a talented child who serves as much as a MacGuffin as he does a character with agency. One character, Mrs. Harrogate, is caught between the Institute’s secrets and the possibility that she might not be on the side of good.
The talents held by the children are highly original—something that goes far towards offsetting the very much done trope of the magical school (Cairndale is also in Scotland)—as they are connected to death in some way. Charlie heals from every injury, even fatal ones, and can also rebuild his body to do all kinds of things that will make your stomach turn. One of the two antagonists, Jacob Marber, can manipulate dust and soot into weapons, transportation, and possession. Marlowe has a mystical connection with the afterlife and is one of the few people who can resist Marber’s attacks and heal the damage afterward.
Ordinary Monsters, for the most part, is a chase novel. Marber chases Marlowe, Alice, Charlie, and others from the American Midwest, to London, to Cairndale itself. One of the best scenes in this book is a cinematic fight on a passenger train between Marber and one of his pet litches and our protagonists. The latter half or so of the book is a siege. Charlie, Marlowe, and their friends in Cairndale use all of their free time trying to figure out what the hell is going on while Marber tries to get inside the Institute to snatch Marlowe at last.
Part of the reason it took me much longer to finish Ordinary Monsters (apart from the fact that I was on vacation in New Orleans for most of a week) was how overstuffed and occasionally slow it was. There were some characters whose narration didn’t add much to the overall experience; rather, the sheer amount of characters investigating what’s really going on at the Institute and what Marber results in a fair amount of repetition as they independently discover the same things. The repetition just slows things down in between some really outstanding fights, escapes, and close calls.
I’m not sure if I’m going to pick up the next book in the series, Bringer of Dust.