Environmental Collapse

While Monstro reveals itself to be Junot Diaz’s fresh take on the popular, familiar flesh-eating zombie trope, the apocalypse is already underway by the time the “Possessed” begin their rampage. Diaz peppers the text with references to the consequences of extreme climate change, like the excessive heat, drought, deforestation coastal erosion, marine habitat destruction, conditions that dictate the already dystopian future in place before the outbreak in Haiti.

In his opening sentences, the narrator references life in his “sector” (107) of Santo Domingo, where he is spending the summer because “droughts that year and the General Economic Collapse “ had made finding a job or internship impossible” , so he joins his mother for “some “of that ole-time climate change” in his ancestral home. Diaz implies that there has already been some kind of catastrophic natural disaster by referring to the “Drowned Sectors” (109) overlooked by Alex’s...