Philip Athans’s Reviews > Dinner on Monster Island: Essays > Status Update

From the titular "Dinner on Monster Island":

"When the monster eats your neighbor for lunch, are you as culpable for your inaction as the people who led it to the door? Who does it eat for dinner when it returns for you and finds your house empty?"

Singapore as a house of horrors in a “Thin Line” between human and monster.

"Black Boxes & Penguin Pulp" was eye-opening. I had no idea Singapore was this provincial. The colonizers did deep, lasting damage to these people.

In “Looks Like the Real Thing,” Tania De Rozario examines her home country of Singapore through the lenses of the TV series Westworld and the Radiohead song “Fake Plastic Trees” in a way that exposes the hypocrisy at work in one of the world’s most expensive and supposedly forward thinking nations.

"Becoming Monsters" is an essay every author and fan of monsters across any and all genres and media must read.

From “My Year of Magic”:

Where I come from, adventure has low bars.

“Conflict Circle” leaves me asking, once again: Does anyone who goes to Catholic school come out a Catholic? I have yet to encounter one.

“I Had a Dream I Was Your Hero” almost made me cry.