Monster
Walter Dean Myers (1999)
“A sixteen-year-old on trial for murder rewrites his life as a screenplay — because the real version is too terrifying to face.”
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Monster
Walter Dean Myers (1999) · 281pages · Contemporary · 2 AP appearances
Summary
Steve Harmon, a sixteen-year-old Black filmmaker from Harlem, stands trial as an accomplice to a drugstore robbery that ended in the owner's murder. Steve processes his terror by rewriting the trial as a movie screenplay, interspersed with raw journal entries that reveal the frightened teenager behind the performance. The prosecution calls Steve a 'monster'; his defense attorney struggles to humanize him; witnesses contradict each other; and the reader is never given certainty about Steve's role. He is acquitted, but his attorney flinches from his embrace, and the final pages show Steve still filming himself months later — searching the footage for the person the trial said he was.
Why It Matters
Monster is one of the first young adult novels to use experimental format — the screenplay/journal hybrid — to explore the criminal justice system from a defendant's perspective. It won the first-ever Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature in 2000 and was a National Book...
Themes & Motifs
Diction & Style
Register: Alternates between the formal, technical language of a screenplay (stage directions, camera angles, scene headings) and the raw, informal voice of a teenager's handwritten journal
Narrator: Steve Harmon occupies two narrator positions simultaneously: the screenplay narrator who describes action from outsid...
Figurative Language: Low in the screenplay sections (deliberately objective, visual) and moderate in the journal entries (simile and metaphor emerge when Steve attempts to describe emotional states the courtroom vocabulary cannot hold). The novel's most powerful figurative device is structural: the screenplay itself is a metaphor for Steve's attempt to direct his own narrative.
Historical Context
Late 1990s America — mass incarceration, war on drugs, racial profiling in the criminal justice system: Monster was published in 1999, at the height of American mass incarceration. The criminal justice system was processing Black and Latino young men at unprecedented rates, often through plea deals a...
Key Characters
Talking Points
- Why does Steve choose to write his trial as a screenplay rather than simply narrating it? What does the screenplay format allow him to do that a conventional first-person narrative would not?
- The word 'monster' is introduced by the prosecutor and adopted by Steve as the title of his screenplay. How does the meaning of this word shift throughout the novel? Who is the 'monster' by the end?
- Why does Myers never definitively reveal whether Steve was the lookout? How does this ambiguity affect the reader's experience compared to the jury's?
- O'Brien turns away from Steve's embrace after the acquittal. What are at least three possible interpretations of this gesture, and which does the novel support?
- How does the novel depict race in the courtroom without ever making race an explicit topic of argument? Identify three moments where racial dynamics are present but unspoken.
Notable Quotes
“The best time to cry is at night, when the lights are out and someone is being beaten up and screaming for help.”
“I want to look like a good person. I want to feel like I'm a good person because I believe I am.”
“You're young, you're Black, and you're on trial. What else do they need to know?”
Why Read This
Because this is a book about what happens when the world decides who you are before you finish deciding for yourself. Steve Harmon is sixteen and on trial for his life, and the scariest part is not the possibility of prison — it is the possibility...