By John Scalzi

Tor, out now

Caught in a dead end job during the early days of the pandemic, Jamie Grey gratefully accepts new employment at an “animal rights organisation”… little realising what sort of animals are involved…

Oh, this is fun! Take all the crazy spectacle of the Jurassic franchise, couple it with kaiju of multiple different sorts, a multiverse, a slimy villain, and John Scalzi’s gift for taking the least likely concepts and explaining how they could (maybe, sort of) actually work… and you’ve got The Kaiju Preservation Society (and I’m sure I’m not the only one to have the theme song from The Italian Job – proper version – running round my head with new words added). In the afterword, Scalzi explains the book’s genesis during the horrors of the last few years, and while I look forward to reading the book he should have been writing, I’m very glad he changed tack for this.

Scalzi carefully roots the book in reality in the early chapters, and we get to understand quite how different things are alongside the narrator, Jamie (he’s there to lift things which includes his colleagues’ spirits from time to time), learning about the kaiju and how they live. There are scientific explanations for the kaiju’s most cinematic elements and suggestions how some of our pop culture might not be more descriptive than imaginative… There’s a solid plot beneath this; early on, a character comments that every kaiju movie gets into the topic of ‘Who is the monster?’ and this novel doesn’t shy from getting into that.

Verdict: Definitely a Society worth signing up for! 9/10

Paul Simpson

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