Monstrosity as a Matter of Perspective: Theme Analysis in The Children on the Hill

The Thematic Claim: Who Gets to Name the Monster?

In The Children on the Hill, Jennifer McMahon builds a sustained argument that monstrosity is never an objective fact—it is a verdict handed down by whoever holds the power to name. The novel opens with an epigraph from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: the creature calls itself “the miserable and the abandoned,” spurned, kicked, and trampled on. That quotation does more than set a gothic tone; it establishes the book's central question. The creature speaking those words is the novel's most sympathetic figure, a being rejected not for what he has done but for what he is perceived to be. McMahon carries that logic into a story where the children who hunt monsters are themselves hunted, where a grandmother who experiments on children is celebrated as a healer, and where the woman who calls herself “a real monster” is the only one offering rescue.

The thematic claim can be stated plainly: in this novel, the label “monster” reveals more about the person applying it than about the person receiving it. The children of the 1978 timeline see werewolves and ghouls in every shadow, but the genuine cruelty in their lives comes from a respected doctor in a blue pantsuit. The 2019 timeline inverts the formula: the figure who embraces the monster identity is the one who saves abused girls, while the men who abuse them—Lauren's father, the vanished abuser—are the ones the narrative treats as truly monstrous.

The Children's Monster Book: Learning to See Monsters

The 1978 timeline introduces the children's worldview through The Book of Monsters, a three-ring binder that Vi writes in and Eric illustrates. The book catalogs vampires, werewolves, wendigos, and other folklore creatures, complete with hunting rules and protective spells. When Iris joins the club, she is asked to write down her favorite monster. Instead of drawing a creature, she draws a rectangle with a smaller rectangle and two circles—a building with windows—and writes “MNSTR” beneath it. The moment is easy to miss, but it is the novel's first quiet reframing. Iris, who has already been subjected to whatever Gran does in the basement of the Hillside Inn, knows that the real monster is not a wolf-headed humanoid. It is the institution itself.

The children's monster hunting is, in part, a way of processing a world they cannot yet name. Vi imagines the Inn as a haunted castle, Miss Ev as a shapeshifter, patient Tom as a werewolf. She spreads mustard on Gran's sandwich and calls it “monster-repelling potion.” These are the coping mechanisms of a child who senses danger but lacks the vocabulary to identify it. The novel lets the reader see what Vi cannot yet articulate: the monsters are not in the woods. They are in the building with the carved sign that reads HOPE.

By July 1978, Vi has learned the truth about Gran. She and Iris have read the files. Vi thinks about going to the police and dismisses the idea: Gran is a well-respected member of the community, a famous doctor people come from all over the country to learn from. The police would laugh. This is the novel's sharpest articulation of the theme. Monstrosity is not a matter of what you do; it is a matter of who you are perceived to be. Gran's reputation inoculates her against the word “monster” even as she drugs children and experiments on them. Vi, meanwhile, practices being an actress, repeating a mantra—“There is nothing wrong. My grandmother takes wonderful care of me”—because survival requires performing normalcy.

The Monster's Origin Story: Made, Not Born

The 2019 chapters narrated by “The Monster” give the reader Vi's adult voice, and they are the novel's most direct engagement with the theme. In Chapter 34, Vi delivers an origin story that reads like a creation myth: “I come from the belly of the snake... From my grandmother's gin still... I am poison.” She describes being held down in the dark room in B West, given 150 volts, “shocked to death, then brought back to life again.” Gran's voice echoes: “You've got a strong heart, Violet Hildreth.”

The crucial detail is that Vi was made into a monster. Gran's experiments—the electricity, the killing jars, the lessons in how to put a sick creature out of its misery—are the machinery of monstrosity. Vi says Gran taught her how to live among the humans, a monster hiding in plain sight. The sentence is double-edged. Gran taught Vi to hide, but Gran herself is the one who hides in plain sight, a monster wearing the costume of a beloved grandmother and celebrated physician.

Vi's embrace of the monster identity is therefore both a wound and a weapon. In Chapter 2, stalking a girl through the Vermont woods, she thinks: “I'm a real monster now. Not just pretend.” She recalls childhood games of pretending to be the Wolf Man and Dracula, chasing her sister and never catching her. Now she intends to catch this girl—not to harm her, but to change her, to save her. The novel forces the reader to hold two contradictory judgments at once: Vi orchestrates violence, and Vi offers rescue. She has arranged for Lauren to kill her abusive father by the end of the novel, and she has given Lauren a new life. The word “monster” cannot contain both truths, which is precisely the point.

The Hunter and the Hunted: Lizzy's Blindness

Lizzy, the adult Iris, is a professional monster hunter. She has written The Monster Hunter's Companion, appeared on television, and built a career on folklore creatures. But the novel is careful to show that Lizzy has never found proof of any monster. She collects stories, photographs, plaster casts of footprints, jars of fur. She listens to eyewitnesses with a trace of envy and deep longing. The monsters she hunts are always just out of reach, and the novel suggests why: she is looking in the wrong direction.

Lizzy's blindness is the theme made structural. She has spent her life hunting wendigos and ghouls while the actual monster—Gran—raised her, shaped her, and experimented on her. When Lizzy finally confronts Vi in the basement in Chapter 40, Vi shows her the laptop with profiles of missing girls who have been given new identities. The girls are alive. Vi has been rescuing them. Lizzy, who has hunted monsters her whole life, has been hunting the one person who was trying to save the girls she thought were lost.

The novel's final chapter, narrated by The Monster, makes the irony explicit. Vi reflects on her relationship with Lizzy: “A monster and a hunter of monsters. Once upon a time sisters, linked not by blood, but by something much deeper.” The hunter and the hunted are the same family. The monster and the monster hunter are two girls who survived the same grandmother.

The Climax: Who Dies, Who Is Saved

The September 5, 2019 chapter is the novel's moral test. Lauren's father—the man who abused her, whose diary documented the abuse, who vanished from Worcester leaving his car and phone behind—is strapped to a bed. Lauren raises a blade. “She's not Lauren anymore,” Vi observes. “Her monster self fully realized.”

The scene forces the reader to decide where the monstrosity lies. The father is the one who abused his daughter. Lauren is the one who kills him. Vi is the one who orchestrates it. By the novel's logic, the father is the monster—not because he is a folklore creature, but because of what he did. Lauren's transformation is framed as rebirth: “Death is always part of the rebirth. Gran taught me that.” The novel does not flinch from the violence, but it also does not present Lauren's act as inexplicable evil. It presents it as the end of a cycle of abuse.

This is where the theme becomes genuinely uncomfortable. The novel asks whether a person who kills an abuser is a monster or a liberator. It refuses to answer cleanly. Vi is both. Lauren is both. The reader is left holding the contradiction.

Complexity and Contradiction

The novel's treatment of monstrosity is not simple. It would be easy to say “the real monsters are human,” but McMahon pushes further. The real monsters are the ones with power and reputation. Gran is a monster not because she is evil in the abstract but because she has the social standing to make her cruelty invisible. The children who hunt monsters are not wrong to look for evil; they are wrong about where to find it.

There is also a deep ambivalence in Vi's own self-conception. She calls herself poison, but she also calls herself a giver of wishes and a miracle worker. She kills, but she saves. She was made a monster by Gran, but she has chosen to use that monstrosity as a tool. The novel does not let the reader off the hook by making Vi purely sympathetic or purely villainous. She is both, and the word “monster” is too small for her.

The epigraph from Frankenstein returns at the end as the novel's true thesis. The creature who speaks those words is miserable and abandoned, spurned and kicked and trampled on. He is also, in Shelley's novel, a killer. The novel refuses to resolve that tension. Monstrosity, in The Children on the Hill, is not a category. It is a perspective.

Study Questions

1. How does the epigraph from Frankenstein frame the novel's treatment of monstrosity?

The epigraph presents the monster as a first-person speaker who is “miserable and abandoned,” spurned and trampled on. This frames the novel's central question: who gets to decide who is a monster? The creature in Shelley's novel is sympathetic even when he commits violence, and the same is true of Vi. The epigraph primes the reader to ask not “is this person a monster?” but “who is calling them a monster, and why?”

2. Why does Iris draw the Inn as her “monster” in The Book of Monsters?

When Iris is asked to write down her favorite monster, she draws a rectangle with a smaller rectangle and two circles—a building with windows—and writes “MNSTR.” Unlike Eric's chimera or the wendigo drawings, Iris's monster is an institution. She has already experienced what happens in the basement of the Hillside Inn, so her unconscious mind identifies the building itself as the source of horror. The moment foreshadows the revelation that Gran, not any folklore creature, is the novel's true monster.

3. How does Vi's self-identification as “a real monster” complicate the reader's judgment of her actions?

Vi embraces the monster label in the 2019 timeline, calling herself “a real monster now. Not just pretend.” But her actions—rescuing abused girls, giving them new identities, orchestrating the deaths of their abusers—are framed as salvation. The novel forces the reader to hold two judgments at once: Vi is a killer, and Vi is a rescuer. The word “monster” cannot contain both truths, which is the point. The label says more about the person applying it than the person receiving it.

4. What does Gran's role as a respected doctor reveal about the novel's critique of institutional authority?

Gran is a famous doctor who people come from all over the country to learn from. Her reputation makes her cruelty invisible. When Vi considers going to the police, she knows they would laugh—Gran is too respected. The novel argues that monstrosity is often protected by social standing. The people with the power to name monsters are often the ones who are monsters themselves.

5. In what ways does the novel suggest that “monster” is a label applied by those in power rather than an objective truth?

The novel repeatedly reframes who qualifies as a monster. The children hunt folklore creatures but the real monster is Gran. Lizzy hunts wendigos but the real monster is her grandmother. Vi is called a monster but she is the one saving girls. Lauren's father is a respected man who abuses his daughter, and Lauren—who kills him—is the one who is “transformed.” In every case, the label “monster” is applied based on perspective, not on objective evil.