 From Yoru Sumino, we are reviewing At Night I Become A Monster. Hey everybody, welcome back to a week in Geekdom Geo here and for the very first time on this channel I am reviewing a light novel. I've always wanted to read one and this is actually my very first one so I have to give a massive shout out to the folks at Seven Seas Entertainment for making this video possible. They were gracious enough to send me a copy for reviewing purposes and I am excited to jump into it. It took me a while but here I am. The last time I read a novel of sorts, I think it was 2010 something like that since college. I have not read novels. I've mostly focused on manga, graphic novel, comics and just whatever the hell I'm doing on this channel, right? So it was a little bit weird and it took, I gotta admit it took me a while to get used to just reading walls of text but fortunately with light novels you know they're light in content where you can speed run through most of these books unless you come across a title like At Night I Become a Monster where it's more psychological in nature. The story begins with the character of Adachi or Adachi. I don't know how to pronounce the name so I apologize in advance. A lot of you purists out there are probably pissed off but that's okay. Adachi he finds when we first start the light novel you learn that he has the ability to turn into this hellish looking monster sort of this black spider looking goo that can morph and bend to his imagination and that's a theme later on as well but at the beginning you're only seeing the cover image and that's what you're basing his transformation on but I sort of envision it more like a mix of a goo spider symbiote like creature from Marvel Comics I think like Venom stuff like that that's what I thought when I first started reading the book. So Adachi turns into this nightmarish creature at night and as you're reading through his narration and what he's going through it was very difficult at first and I would have loved to have seen this in a movie or something because it sounds pretty badass the whole body horror aspect of him transforming sounds hellish but once he transforms most nights before the start of the book he I guess took fun in scaring people passing by and eventually he grew tired of that stuff because it wasn't fair for other people so he was just taking the opportunity to sneak out of the house he's a high schooler if I remember correctly or a junior high and would take strolls around the town and go to nearby beaches or cliffs or mountains or whatever basically to just stroll at night I guess that he lost the ability to sleep because now at night he's just patrolling those the streets we are never given a specific town where he's living at so I think that's cool because you can sort of place them wherever you want just know that there is a beach in that city so the character of Adachi once the night ends he reverts back to his human form and goes to school like every other teenager and in school is where a majority I'm going to say 95% of the plot of this book happens when he goes in there's this other character called Yano Satsuki and she is the book says she's ostracized she did some bad things to other girls in the classroom and as a result she's become the target of a massive effort to bully her and that is I think the central theme of the book about bullying others and the effect that it can have on people and she's an odd girl she's a very eccentric and kind of eclectic young girl and she's very expressive with her emotional state and she will grin a lot and smile in her nervousness and a lot of people misinterpret that and they think she's a freak and a weirdo and all that stuff and they bully her and sort of the class forms this really odd and downright for me at least disturbing idea that they all have to gang up on her and sort of you cannot defend her and everybody's means are because of what she did but even though that's in the past now everybody sort of has this collective mentality that you can't you can't give her any reason or you can't acknowledge the fact that hey she's a regular girl she's she might be a little bit weird let's try and sort things out instead you have this high school mentality because you know they're kids they're they're not going to be that sensible so everybody just ignores her or they bump into her or they i think at one part of the book they throw cold water in her seat so she sits on on cold water they'll chalk up her desk her school desk stuff like that they're being mean to her one specific night the character of adachi decides on his midnight strolls i guess he decides to venture to school at night because he left some textbooks that he needed for the other day so he went to the school at night and was surprised to find the character of yano there she figures out through a series of interesting dialogue that this hellish monster creature black spider goop is actually our main protagonist and the two sort of form a very odd bond at night they start meeting up in this school and having some interesting conversations at first they're a little bit weird but as the days continue and you know the nights continue i should say the conversation turns more peculiar more intense as they sort of try or at least adachi tries to figure out how yano works you know how her mind works and i gotta say i i have to be honest with you guys uh not having that much of exposure to light novels i had forgotten that a lot of it is just characters thinking to themselves a lot of minuscule details and that can help because you get a full picture in your head of what is happening i i miss that because i'm so used to reading manga and comics where you know it's graphic and none of that stuff is there you're just seeing the dialogue and the actions out in display so sometimes i would be just a little bit turned off or a little bit bored i would say with the constant explanations about the most insignificant things which kind of buck me because this is a fairly simple premise there's not a whole lot there's not a whole lot to it you just have these two characters who are meeting up at night and having these conversations and then in the daylight they don't really talk to each other because adachi is fearful of what the group mentality will think and will do if he befriends her or starts to get to know her or starts to understand why she's doing the things she's doing and we see examples of that friends of you know classmates have altercations with the character and they're misinterpreted by the group and they think those classmates are trying to reason with her and that is unacceptable either hate her or like her that's the sort of mentality that the group forms and they start to dislike these characters that are doing this like i said and adachi starts wondering like maybe i should say something but maybe i don't i would rather just stay quiet stay in my place and not do anything and i guess that's a really interesting critique on the people out there that you know you see injustice you see things happening and you turn a blind eye and you don't participate you want to stay neutral especially in today's world climate a lot of people unfortunately uh tend to stay neutral in a lot of things because they they don't want to deal with the baggage and the emotional drama and the conflict and the potential the potential falling out when it comes to interacting with people in such a way maybe helping others and stopping injustice or stopping people from saying things that might hurt other people adachi is this type of person he's a good kid at heart but is flawed in his thinking and as his experiences with yano satsuki continues that starts to slowly change and them having conversations at night where he's in his monster form you really start to think which form is really it's the real version of him is it the daylight version or is it the monster that's true or to his nature and i i i really enjoyed that the author yoru sumino also created i want to eat your pancreas which was a really heartfelt and powerful emotional story this isn't exactly as emotional but it does tackle some issues whether it's mental health whether it's growing up and the concept of good and bad through the eyes of teenagers and then growing up figuring things out it's a little bit slow at the beginning and it's not until the halfway point where something dramatic happens and if you don't want to find out what that is you can skip ahead a couple of seconds to what i'm saying right now uh somebody finds out about adachi transforming or there's a rumor floating around that he's that there's this kaiji like monster at school and a few characters are going to the school at night to try and catch him so there's all this massive altercation between four characters that part really excited me to continue the story all the way through the end to see how the story ends and to see how that relationship between yano and adachi form and how somebody can change their way or their way of thinking with somebody that has been ostracized and has been labeled as a weird person a problematic person how a formal relationship can be formed out of that and of course to not judge everything by how it first looks and for that i do think it is a really cool story and i do recommend it if you want to read something that's more psychological with a little bit of horror elements to it i think you're going to be right at home with this it's not too long i think it was uh close to 300 pages and at the end even though these characters are doing and saying horrible things you kind of realize that that in itself is human nature where nobody's going to be the same nobody's going to be equal and everybody has different opinions and it takes it takes character and and realization to progress and evolve as a person and adachi has that potential in the book i'm not going to spoil what happens but just know that well yes the characters are not necessarily the best ones it is a story worth checking out in my honest opinion now it's a light novel so it doesn't have any art i can't judge it but i do like the cover though i really liked it there's this really overpowered ability that he develops midway through the book where i'm like okay the story if it wasn't a drama about the terrors of the night and the horrors of school life and growing up during a day i would have thought this was a monster action series but it wasn't at night i become a monster is a really fun story that i'm glad to have read and now i'm interested in picking up light novels so oh boy let's see what happens have you read this book let me know in the comment section down below and if you haven't what are some of your favorite light novels that you think i should check out let me know in the comment section as well thank you everybody for tuning in thank you for liking commenting subscribing and being a part of a weekend geek again it really does mean a whole lot thank you so very much i have got to go i will catch all of you on our next video