ShodhPatra: International Journal of Science and Humanities

Healing through Horror: Psychological Trauma in Patrick Ness’ A Monster Calls

This paper examines the representation of psychological trauma in Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls and argues that the novel’s horror elements, which include, a recurring nightmare, a monstrous yew-tree visitor, and a pervasive atmosphere of dread, function not as generic ornamentation but as a structured mechanism through which the child protagonist, Conor O’Malley, confronts and works through repressed grief. Drawing on attachment theory, grief theory, interpersonal psychiatry, and psychoanalytic dream theory, the study reads Conor’s encounters with the monster as externalisations of an internal psychic process, in which fear operates paradoxically as a therapeutic rather than purely destructive force. The paper situates this reading within the broader tradition of English horror and Gothic literature, in which monstrosity has long served as a vehicle for confronting socially or psychologically unspeakable material, and considers how Ness adapts this tradition for a child readership working through terminal parental illness. Employing a qualitative method of close textual analysis supported by psychoanalytic and attachment-based criticism, the paper traces the stages of Conor’s trauma, attachment disruption, family dysfunction, and repression, as they are mediated through the monster’s stories, and argues that the novel’s ending reframes fear as a precondition for honesty and recovery. The analysis suggests that the novel constructs horror as a restorative genre, in which the child’s fear of the monster gradually gives way to a fear of his own suppressed truth, constituting the novel’s central contribution to English horror literature’s engagement with monstrosity as a means of psychological disclosure.