The Kaiju Preservation Society, John Scalzi

[emperor]

This is the first Scalzi I've read. On this showing, I'm not inclined to read another (which is a surprise, because I know he's very popular). It feels like it ought to be a great premise for a book - a secret organisation, an alternate reality close to ours, giant monsters. But there's an awful lot of nothing much of note happening, the characters are all broadly the same wise-cracking smartarse, the plot developments such as they were were telegraphed a mile off (even I saw them nearly all coming), and I managed to come away with no real idea of what anything looked like. And this wasn't a Lovecraftian horrors that defy sanity and coherent description sort of thing, either: our narrator doesn't think it's interesting to note much other than that they're very big and very loud (and similarly doesn't bother describing anything else).

It's still quite fun - the villain is odiously hateable, there are a lot of one-liners since basically all the characters are that sort of person, and it's a great premise. There's just not enough material here to go with that premise.

Comments

[wpadmirer]

I'm not a Scalzi fan. I think he gets by on cleverness rather than actually being a good writer.

I was in a creative writing program at the university with a guy like that. Drove me crazy. He ended up teaching English, and was probably a good teacher, but never published.