Pam Kowalski is a Monster! by Sarah Langan — When memory lies and the world unravels

There’s something deliciously unsettling about realizing your memories might be wrong. Sarah Langan’s Pam Kowolski Is a Monster! turns that unease into a full-blown psychological and supernatural meltdown. This novella barrels through themes of memory, trauma, and rivalry with the manic energy of an apocalypse that might already be happening — or might only be in the mind of its unraveling narrator.

Janet Chow’s life didn’t exactly pan out the way her classmates might have predicted back at Sewanhaka High. Once destined for greatness, she’s now middle-aged, adrift, and licking the wounds of a career in journalism that has long since crashed and burned. Then she spots her old nemesis — Pam Kowolski, the girl she used to despise — who has somehow transformed into “Madame Pamela,” America’s psychic sweetheart and doomsday influencer. Pam is rich, beautiful, and adored, while Janet is invisible. Convinced that Pam’s fame is built on lies, Janet sets out to expose her as a fraud. But digging into Pam’s past also means unearthing the pieces of her own history that she’s conveniently buried — and the deeper she digs, the more she starts to question what’s real, what’s remembered, and what’s imagined.

Langan plays expertly with the slippery nature of memory. Janet’s recollections of her childhood — especially her mother’s death and her own role in it — begin to fracture and reassemble into something more horrifying than she ever allowed herself to see. The author uses these cracks in Janet’s perception not only to build dread but to pose a haunting question: when we discover what we’ve forgotten, can we still trust what we think we remember? The result is a deeply uncomfortable but compulsively readable descent into unreliable memory and self-deception.

Running parallel to the horror of Janet’s crumbling mind is a quieter, more human theme — the question of who our true friends are. Throughout the story, Janet is surrounded by people whose loyalties prove hollow. Her roommate openly dislikes her, yet when he becomes seriously ill, it’s Janet who shows up for him while his so-called friend — his weed dealer — disappears. The same pattern repeats across Janet’s life. Teachers she once idolized turn out to be deeply flawed, and her understanding of her relationship with Pam back in high school begins to unravel, too. The people she thought she could rely on were never truly there, while those she overlooked become the ones who matter. Langan threads these realizations into the larger chaos of the book, forcing Janet — and the reader — to reevaluate what loyalty and connection really mean.

What makes this novella feel especially timely is how its world echoes our own. As Janet’s sense of reality deteriorates, so too does the fabric of the world around her. News feeds, influencers, and even the laws of nature begin to feel warped. Reading it feels a little like scrolling through social media today — watching reality splinter into contradictions until you can’t tell what’s true anymore. Langan captures that same disorientation many of us feel in 2025, when it sometimes seems like we’ve slipped into an alternate universe where logic and decency no longer apply. The story taps into that cultural unease with uncanny precision.

Stylistically, Langan keeps the story brisk and biting. Janet’s voice is bitter, funny, and painfully self-aware — the kind of narrator you don’t always like but can’t stop listening to. The prose moves with manic urgency, switching tones and formats in a way that mirrors Janet’s unstable grasp on truth. The result is a reading experience that feels slightly off-kilter, like reality itself is vibrating at the wrong frequency. It’s unsettling, yes, but also weirdly exhilarating.

If there’s one drawback, it’s that the novella’s brevity sometimes leaves you wanting more — more explanation, more closure, more time to sit in the revelation of what’s really going on. The “Big Reveal” comes fast, almost like an aftershock. But that might be exactly Langan’s intent. In a story about distortion, the lack of neat resolution feels right.

Pam Kowolski Is a Monster! is as funny as it is unnerving, as sharp as it is surreal. Sarah Langan uses her unreliable narrator to probe how trauma warps memory and how belief — in ourselves, in others, in reality — can twist into something monstrous. The apocalypse here is personal as much as cosmic, and it’s impossible to look away. Readers who loved A Good Person will find themselves right at home in its chaos.

Pam Kowolski Is a Monster! releases on November 11, 2025, and is now available for pre-order.

Have you read any of Sarah Langan’s work before, or are unreliable narrators your thing? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

An advance reader copy of this book (ARC) was provided to me by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Related Content

• How Sarah Langan took her deepest fears as a new mother and built them Into a novel (CrimeReads)
• Q&A: Sarah Langan, author of A Better World (The Nerd Daily)
• Interview with an author: Sarah Langan (Los Angeles Public Library)
• Author spotlight: Sarah Langan (Nightmare Magazine)

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