Monstrous Bonds – Marissa Lingen's chapbook of monstrous friendliness

Many of you would know of Marissa. She writes beautiful shorts that are thoughtful and sometimes heart rending and sometimes uplifting. She brings the quirk, too. So when I saw her announcement of this chapbook, I snapped it up. I know Marissa mostly from her flash work, which is always a masterclass.
This was a welcome set of light hearted and clever stories crafted by an expert. It is hard to do it justice without spoilers, but Marissa builds intimate personal connections between characters that feel so real, so grounded, that of course you take the Kaiju battles and the litigating water monsters and the strange flatmates as a given. Honestly, I've had stranger flatmates, and definitely ones that were harder to live with.
The thing that Marissa does so well (apart from build such believable worlds) is dialogue and character interaction. Time and again you can picture these characters taking fantastical things in stride while also dealing with the everyday dilemmas we all face. All in all, this chapbook was a nice work to dip in and out of when I was looking for a break from other things. My only quibble is that it is a chapbook, and thus short. But hey, Marissa has a story bot that tweets links to her previously published work, so more is just a few clicks away.
 
Marissa's webpage in here https://marissalingen.com/

You can get your copy of Monstrous Bonds here https://marissalingen.com/blog/?post_type=product
 
The story bot is @LingenStoryBot