By Tim Lebbon

Titan Books, out now

MONARCH’s trip to Skull Island is not destined to end well…

If you’ve not caught the latest in Legendary’s monster cycle at the cinema, want to relive it, or felt (as I did) that a number of the characters within the movie weren’t as well-developed on screen as perhaps they might have been and want to know more about them, then you’re going to enjoy Tim Lebbon’s novelisation. Reading the Making of/Art book shows the unusual development that the script underwent, and Lebbon takes the disparate elements and weaves an engaging tale that – inevitably given the timeframes of movie post-production and book writing – differs in a few places from the final film, but adds a lot to what was on screen.

It’s not just the internal thoughts of the key characters that has been added – we get some nice shading of backstory, explaining why Tom Hiddleston’s Conrad acts as he does, and what drives Brie Larson’s Mason Weaver, as well as broadening our understanding of the Kurtz-like Packard. There are even a few moments from Kong’s perspective; although I really hoped that when the final battle with the Skull Devil was concluding, Kong would be doing a James T. Kirk “I… have… had… enough… of…you” equivalent, sadly not… although there is a Star Trek joke hidden in there.

There are a couple of scenes featuring other flora and fauna on Skull Island that weren’t in the film; whether these were Lebbon’s additions or deleted scenes doesn’t matter – they help to make the Island itself as much a character in the story as Kong himself.

Verdict: An enjoyable fleshing out of the story. 8/10

Paul Simpson