I suppose this is a story of a man who is battling his addictions against a demon of an employer. Gibson was a success chef whose drug addiction destroyed his career and marriage. A chance encounter while on probation lands him a dream job as a personal chef to an enigmatic, reclusive, controlling superstar who calls himself Monster. Monster’s culinary requests challenge Gibson, but not nearly enough and he finds himself bored in a miserable position in the middle of nowhere. The pace picks up a...

It's hard to pin this one down.. it was definitely compulsively readable. I couldn't stop reading once I started - read it straight from beginning to end, which is rare for me, but it was also not too long of a book. It held me interest and provided some amusement. There wasn't the extreme creep factor that I expected.. it got creepy and .. well weird more often then creepy, but I expected something a little.. *more.* I just don't know how else to put it. I totally didn't expect that the Monster...

This. Book. Was. Weird. But I had to keep reading because I wanted know what was up with Monster. I still don't know what was up with him. I was glad that Gibson had a happy ending thought. In spite of his addiction.

What A RideNot what I was expecting but good nonetheless. Our chef is hired to cook for Monster...an insanely rich music star. You think this is going to be a story about the chef and his redemption. But it's way more than that. May be looking for more of Tervalon's writing.

I can't say I much enjoyed reading this book. What mostly kept me reading was that I told myself that I would understand it all in the end, that somehow it would all be explained. The ending offered little explanation of Monster or his motivations or anything really. As the pages went by, I felt like I knew and understood the main character less and less. But for all of that, I have to say I really enjoyed the style in which it was written. Not a bad book at all, perhaps just not my cup of tea.

Well... let’s see... good things about this book is it was a quick read, I liked the style of writing, I wanted to continue reading until the end to find out what the hell was going on. The recipes are a neat idea at the start of every chapter.The bad things about this book.... “monster” and how he was described is pretty damn close to a real life celebrity so that was always niggling at the back of my head.I may try one of the dozen recipes... maybe... they seemed overly complicated I felt othe...

Awesome twisted tale of suspense! When a chef named Gibson goes to work for a notorious rock star known as Monster, he has no idea what he's getting into. The job pays more than he imagined, but the mansion he lives and cooks in is pretty creepy, especially at night. And since he signed a confidentiality clause, he can't say much about all the weird things he sees...things that either terrify him or turn his stomach. Not ideal conditions for a recovering drug addict.Jervey Tervalon's prose is ph...

Mixed up messy story about a recovering cocaine addict and his brief employment with a Michael Jackson/Kanye celebrity entity. Have you ever listened to a not-close friend talk about a dumb dream about being chased by some silly shit? If you've been through that, you don't need to read this. Oh, and every chapter begins with a recipe, that you won't ever look at twice, so um....bonus?

Gibson is a rising star in the world of food in New York until an escalating drug habit costs him his restaurant, his wife and his freedom. When he makes it out of jail and is paroled to a halfway house it is his manager’s girlfriend who suggests to him that he move to L.A. to become the private chef of a world famous rock star known as Monster. And so Gibson goes, in Jervey Tervalons’s new novel Monster’s Chef. He leaves behind his life and moves onto Monster’s massive, isolated compound (known...

Somewhere along the way in 2014 I had acquired an uncorrected proof of this novel. It had been sitting on my self and I randomly grabbed it when I went away the first weekend of the year. As we relaxed in our hotel room before heading out for the night I looked at some reviews of the book and found a debate about the influence of Monster. The majority of people feel that Tervalon pulled his inspiration from Michael Jackson and a handful think everyone else is crazy and that's not the case at all...

WTF. I gotta stop reading these weird books. Ugh.

I flip-flopped all the way through this book, between 'I like it' and 'I don't like it'. The similarities between the main character and narrator, Monster and late Michael Jackson are blatant. I found this distracting. The character development was thin, making it difficult to feel an attachment to them. Tervalon definitely has talent, although it took a few pages to get into his humorous, hip style. But once I got it, I was laughing out loud a lot. About half way through it lags a bit. At times...

This book made me feel genuinely gross while reading it which I suppose was its intent so points for that. Beautiful layout but confusing ending - a rollercoaster of a story.

As I read this book, I kept wondering how it is that the author of this book isn't going to get sued by the estate of a certain one-gloved megastar! While I've seen many TV shows and read many books that are more than loosely based on real people - even this person - I've never seen one that was quite so blatant about it.Whatever else you can say about the author, he's got chutzpah!It's hard to separate out the scandalous reality of the 'fictional' Monster, but the book itself was fascinating. T...

This was one of the worst books I've ever read in my life. Great beginning with potential and suddenly this book turns into a godawful clunky, idiotic, shitty mess with a Michael Jackson-type villain. I mean, I'm so confused and yet so angry I spent the last couple hours finishing what I thought might actually be a decent book. Fuck this book.

I was very intrigued until the last quarter of the book, at which point it took a very strange and very hard left turn into territory that I hadn't been expecting at all. Rather than this being a good thing, the transition was so odd that it completely took me out of the story.

This was well on its way to a four-star book, until I got to page 186, where all the build-up of the previous pages just flew spectacularly off the rails and landed with a thud that would make a disposable TV movie's climax look like high art. An interesting and insightful book about the twisted and warped world of a mega-pop-star (obviously modeled on latter-day Michael Jackson) had so much potential to be an amazing read that would have stayed with me; but then the end went completely non-line...

I found this book on a list of books to read this summer, then happened to find it on the bookshelf of my local bookstore so I picked it up. I very shocked when I was told the price of the book at around $25 for 200 pages, making it easily the most expensive book I've purchased this year when you factor the price vs. page. I found the book to be kind of annoying. I felt at times it was too wordy, to the point it started to hurt the narrative from moving forward. Where plot points would just kind...

2 stars = "it was ok" by GR's rating system.The writing style and actually the whole book was a bit of a train wreck. The writing style was hard to read but I was able to finish it because it was a short book (210 pages) and because the words used were simple. I was actually quite sympathetic with the narrator (Gibson) and felt we suffered together from the writing. I wish there was more meat to the book but there was just a long intro before anything happened, then a quick finish. Good premise,...

I received a free copy from Goodreads First Reads. Jervey Tervalon weaves a tale about a chef who is a recovering drug addict who manages to become the chef of a music superstar at his 'lair'. There are many things that made me think that perhaps the music superstar or "Monster" as he is called in the book might actually be hinting at a pop star we all know. This book deals with gritty subject matter, drugs, murder, etc. Even with the "Monster" character, the gritty subject matter, I did find I