SPOILERS!

Volume 8 is my favorite book from this latest SIKTC binge (Volumes 6-8). It’s a satisfying digestif after consuming so much violence and drama in the two prior books. It starts out in familiar territory (but with a twist). It starts with the rare occurrence of a monster created from the fears of a puppy. The chapter ends with Erica ruminating about family or “People you love. People you can rely on” when she is asked if she gets to go home.

I’m stuck on this idea that Volume 8 is making obvious the creation of Erica’s “found family” and how she doesn’t consciously want it, but subconsciously, she is slotting the people she feels close to into familial roles. The death of Erica’s biological family and the rules of her monster hunting have left her trying to be cold but I don’t think she can – I don’t think as human beings we can. I want to believe that in the found family she has constructed, Jessica is “mom” or the cool aunt or much older sister and Aaron is the annoying brother. I haven’t figured out who dad is. Mr. Wheeler?

After the puppy’s monster, while fighting a monster in a liquor store, Erica has an exasperating call with Aaron. When the little girl she is with asks her, “Was that your brother?” Erica replies dismissively, “I don’t know. He’s something like that.”

My brain briefly jumped back to the purple panel at the end of the first story in Volume 8. It’s purple. The darkest panel on the page. Jessica and Erica are eating dinner parked outside a diner with their food on the hood of their car. Erica is laughing. The caption says, “I don’t have that anymore.”

And then in the next chapter, Erica offers to fix a girl’s hair after a prank leaves it uneven and awkwardly cut. Erica tells her she used to do it for her “friend Jessica.” The chapter that follows this is my favorite. There aren’t any monsters in the typical sense. Instead, it introduces a psychological “monster” that gets made by some hunters as a consequence of fighting other people’s monsters. Erica tells the therapist she’s there because she would like to stop crying. She tells him that lately she “keeps crying” and that’s a problem because it means “you’re weak.”

She tells the therapist that the other children would pick on Aaron because he cried. Afterwards, he’d try to pick on her to make her cry but failed because she was meaner. She was also meaner to the kids that picked on him. When he asks if she’s ever seen an adult cry, she says yes. There is a panel of her driving, while Jessica looks despondent, facing the window with her eyes closed and the wind whipping her hair across her face. And another with Erica curled up in bed with her hands over her ears and Jessica on the bed next to hers, with her arms over her eyes. I assumed she was crying.

The chapter ends with the therapist telling Erica that “everybody gets kids backwards.” Sure, it’s true that they’re “balls of emotion,” but they’re logical above all else. They want to figure out “how the world works” and “why things happen.” There’s a practical reason why Erica has been crying. It’s to make sure we remember all of the things we loved and hated about the person that’s gone, so we can spot the person that we’re going to love and protect ourselves from getting hurt.

Volume 8 ends with Erica and Aaron speaking on a park bench. She is recounting her last mission. The one where a little girl died trying to help her. After the girl’s death, Erica begins nursing the suspicion that the girl was abused by her father and that the monster was created by her fear of him. But is this truly the case or is she just creating a false narrative to help her understand how and why?

Erica breaks down when she tells Aaron the little girl’s name was Jessica. He puts his arm around her and tells her “there are a lot of other girls out there” to which she responds, “I know. Where am I going next?”

I appreciated the focus on Erica’s mental well-being after Jessica’s death. The last two chapters introduced the notion that hunters make monsters of their own as a result of the emotional toll that hunting takes.