Seventeen-year-old Fran is plagued by monsters that leach out from folklore and legend and invade her thoughts and dreams. We meet her at the dog-end of the summer holidays, in limbo between GCSEs and A levels, and at a crossroads between grief and recovery after the death of her mother. Commuting between her suburban past when her mother was alive, and the time-warped present of her Nana's council flat, Fran begins to claim her grief back from the monsters and live with it in the everyday.

Fran is a keen amateur cryptozoologist (an expert in the study of animals that may not exist) and she can't quite tell if the animals she meets are real or part of her imagination. But one thing is for sure: monsters are all around us. The year is 1993, and we join Fran on a wild ride around London while she negotiates its real or imagined menageries. Tales of strange creatures that might-have-been introduce each stage of her journey. Fran's adventure, often with her best friend Alex in tow, is a psychogeography of London and its suburbs--a picaresque graphic novel in which the grief of losing her mother is punctuated by encounters with her semi-estranged dad, her out-of-touch East London Nana, a selfish boyfriend, and the odd black dog or two.