The Monstrumologist

Unfortunately, I found the framing story of this to be significantly more interesting than the main story we spend our time with, which made it really hard to care a bunch about this. The format (a diary with a frame story) feels a bit like old-fashioned Lovecraftian horror, but unfortunately, despite the monsters themselves being intriguing and potentially horrifying, I never felt horrified. Or intrigued. Or much of anything until the very end, where we return to the frame story. The idea of this is awesome but in practice it doesn't work very well. Will, our main character, is held at a remove (possibly due to the whole framing/diary format, though I have read books/stories (see Lovecraft) that manage this just fine), and because of that, I never feel anything that he feels.It's also possible he just doesn't feel anything. He handles all the monsters with remarkable aplomb for a preteen, and it's hard to be scared when he doesn't actually feel scared. He seems to exist just to tell the story but he's not acting like he's living it. Warthrop is hard to feel much for as well. He's remarkably cold, even when we start getting a bit of backstory. He has a moment near the end where you see him feeling something, but even that is very at-arms-length and it's hard to make a real connection. I was really hoping for a neat cryptozoology adventure that creeped me out and unfortunately I spent most of the main story faintly bored.