Published September 15th 2026 by St. Martins Press
Published September 15th 2026 by St. Martins Press
Something lives under Willa’s bed. As an adult, her fondest childhood memories are of the invisible entity under her bed who taught her how to read. Now thirty-two, Willa is a reclusive but successful painter until a bombshell news report exposes her identity as the controversial survivor of the unsolved Rapture Mystery Slayings, a small-town tragedy that splashed across headlines during her senior year of high school. Six teenagers died in the woods while Willa walked free, and everyone thinks she killed them.
When an old classmate calls about a funeral, Willa reluctantly travels to her sleepy hometown, where the possessed forest that stole her friends looms. The trees whistle for her attention, but she knows better than to listen. And the unexplained knocking from the shadows in the basement of her decaying childhood home is honestly the least of her problems.
As her past pulls her back to the place where she swore she’d never return, Willa is drawn toward the monster she left behind—and becoming the villain her hometown has always believed her to be.
I Am the Monster Under the Bed is an ambitious debut that dreams big, and Zinnikas has some nightmares to share.
There is a lot happening here: multiple plot threads, timelines folding in on each other, flashbacks woven throughout, and there are moments where it gets in its own way. I had to have some faith that it would all converge in some mysterious way.
Willa is an unreliable narrator with survivor's guilt. She's impulsive, possibly a little bonkers, and has childhood trauma dragging her down as well. I actually liked her a lot.
The supernatural elements in particular feel underexplaned, and left me wanting more. The rules of the monster-verse felt fuzzy, and I kept wanting Zinnikas to slow down and let the weirdness breathe and really show itself. Maybe that readers must fill in the blanks is why it works in the end.
It is the kind of finale that makes you sit with the book closed for a second because you didn't see it coming, but it lands exactly right. Surprising and satisfying in equal measure, which is honestly harder to pull off than it sounds for a debut.
Despite the chaos of the middle, even the monster under the bed thinks the ending was worth the wait.