With There’s a Monster Behind the Door, Gaëlle Bélem (Bullaun Press) crafts a novel that is as ferocious as it is poetic, as unsettling as it is compelling. Set in the 1980s on the island of La Réunion, the story follows a young girl—self-described as “la teigne,” or “the scab”—as she grows up in a hostile household and a society teetering between neglect and superstition. Far from the idyllic postcard image of a tropical paradise, Bélem’s La Réunion is a crumbling landscape where poverty, ignorance, and inherited trauma shape daily life. And yet, from this harsh soil emerges a voice that is sharp, defiant, and unforgettable.
A Child Among Monsters
The narrator is born into a family of “nobodies”—the Dessaintes—a clan Bélem describes as “born garbage,” fallen into violence, madness, and social ruin since the 17th century. From her first breath, the girl is despised by her parents, both of whom are steeped in superstition, passivity, and cruelty. Her childhood in Saint-Benoît is marked by verbal abuse, physical violence, and psychological manipulation. Her parents fill her world with monsters—both imaginary and real—feeding on her fear and naivety.
Their only guiding principle? “That’s the way it is and that’s that.” It’s an educational philosophy that replaces care with fatalism, warmth with punishment. Instead of nurturing their daughter’s natural curiosity, they threaten her with reform school, make her fear swallowing orange seeds lest a tree grow inside her, and drown the household in late-night horror films that become the soundtrack of her formative years.
The horror, however, is not confined to fiction. When her father disappears without warning, the family unravels further. Her mother spirals into despair and delusion, convinced he still hides somewhere in the house. The absurdity of this belief, and the narrator’s mock-serious attempts to search every nook and cranny for him, serve as a darkly comic moment in an otherwise relentless tale of hardship. This balance between grotesque humour and genuine pain defines Bélem’s style.
The Monster as Metaphor
As the title suggests, monsters are not just scary bedtime tales—they’re a metaphor for the crushing weight of inherited poverty and social exclusion. The Dessaintes family, who consider themselves monstrous, reflect the broader condition of their homeland. Bélem paints La Réunion not as a paradise but as a “heap of rubble” and a “rock with the taste of ashes and blood,” far removed from the tourist brochures.
This symbolic weight gives the novel its literary power. The monstrous becomes a way of speaking about intergenerational trauma, about being poor and forgotten, about growing up without love or possibility. The young narrator’s dreams are haunted by grotesque creatures, but these nightmares echo the waking horrors of her everyday life. The real monsters, Bélem seems to suggest, are not the devils of folklore but the apathy, abuse, and resignation that infect both home and society.
Voice as Resistance
What saves the narrator is her mind. From a young age, she takes refuge in reading and, by the age of seven, discovers her calling as a writer. School becomes her lifeline, a place that her parents ridicule but which gives her the tools to resist their toxic influence. Despite the chaos at home—unemployment, alcoholism, domestic violence—she excels academically, eventually passing her baccalauréat with distinction.
This pursuit of education it’s a spiritual rebellion. Her brilliance becomes a source of conflict, as her parents see it as arrogance or betrayal. When she finally leaves home, leaving behind a note that reads I hate you mum, aunt, it’s a symbolic break not only from her mother but from the legacy of silence and suffering she represents.
The novel’s final sections trace the narrator’s continued struggle for self-definition. Living with an elderly aunt, working menial jobs, even attempting a joint business with her unstable mother, she continues to write. And in writing, she reclaims the voices of those dismissed and degraded: “Let the mad, the antisocial, the worthless women, the quarrelsome, the suicidal, the hands that tremble—let them be mine!… For here, their pain is told and their disgrace blessed.”
Tragicomedy and Satire
Bélem’s prose, described by French reviewers as “lively, rhythmic, rich, and inventive,” avoids sentimentality through sharp satire and biting irony. Her tone is deliberately mocking and sarcastic, often bordering on cruel. Nothing escapes ridicule: the overblown wedding of her parents, the hollow television clichés, the absurd justifications for violence. Even the narrator’s darkest moments are told with a sense of comic detachment, a strategy that allows Bélem to handle tragedy without descending into pathos.
This tragicomic tone is not simply literary flourish—it’s survival. Laughter becomes a shield, irony a weapon. Bélem doesn’t excuse her characters’ flaws, nor does she romanticize their suffering. She exposes the intellectual, emotional, and material poverty of her world with unflinching clarity, but she does so with a rhythm and a wit that transform bleakness into something fiercely alive.
From Local to Universal
One of the novel’s great achievements is its ability to universalize a deeply local story. By preserving the diglossic texture of La Réunion—the mix of French and kréol rényoné—translators Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert allow English-speaking readers to feel the linguistic richness and cultural tension of the island. They explain, in an interview with The Booker Prizes, that their approach was to “immerse the reader” rather than flatten the language.
This attention to voice and language helps ground the novel in its Réunionese reality, while also connecting it to broader questions of class, family, and identity. The result is a text that resonates far beyond its setting—a meditation on how we survive when the world gives us nothing, and how storytelling can turn pain into meaning.
Literary Acclaim and Cultural Significance
There’s a Monster Behind the Door is the first novel by a Réunionese woman to be published by Gallimard and was longlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize, a testament to its literary and cultural significance. In French literary circles, it has been praised as a “tragicomic ode to the forgotten people of La Réunion,” a book that shows both the failures and the resilience of a marginalized community.
Critics have noted the occasional risk of cynicism in the relentless catalog of misfortune, and some readers may be unsettled by Bélem’s merciless tone. But even these critiques recognize the novel’s ambition and its power. It is not a comfortable read—but it is an essential one.
Conclusion: Fire and Brilliance
Gaëlle Bélem’s There’s a Monster Behind the Door is a debut of remarkable force and originality. It shines a light on a part of the world too often ignored, offering a narrative that is both deeply personal and culturally resonant. In its pages, we find cruelty, neglect, and despair—but also humour, resistance, and the irrepressible spark of creativity.
This is a fierce reclamation of dignity. Bélem’s narrator may have been born into a world of monsters, but by the end of the novel, she becomes something else entirely: a writer, a witness, a voice that cannot be silenced.
