The Big Bad Book of Kaiju by Jonathan Maberry and Henry Herz

Book Review

Sarah Deeming

As the nights draw in and the temperature drops, now is the time for horror, and where better to start the season that with Titan Books The Big Bad Book of Kaiju edited by Jonathan Maberry and Henry Herz.

The stories are varied. Some are contemporary like Horned by Benjamin Spada in which a Texas park ranger is hunting for some missing hikers, while others are in the past or in a future overrun or destroyed by monsters, such as Mama Bear by Jeremy Robinson in which a young woman is surviving in a Dead Zone where ghosts walk the streets killing anyone who gets in their way. In some, the monster is not the oversized cat or collection of teenagers morphed into a massive juggernaut demanding fair treatment (actual examples from the collection), it’s the giant corporations who see humans as disposable, or a single man willing to kill for their on selfish ends. Most monsters are manmade, because let’s be honest, we are the biggest threat to the world, some protect us, others want to destroy us, and some don’t see us at all, like Kaiju Poo Poo by Scott Sigler where people are hiding underground while kaiju control the land above, too big even see us.

One of my favourites was The Pain of Giants by Tim Lebbon, where two warring tribes used giant insects to battle each other to solve their differences. The world-building was fantastic: villages built on the edge of a great chasm with wooden stilts rising high above the houses so the insects can move without hurting the residents. Lebbon also explores the way humanity presses other creatures to work for them and how those sentient beings might feel about being forced to battle for someone else’s reasons.

Another favourite is Complete Garbage by Jonathan Maberry where a group of scientific researchers studying the Pacific Ocean trash island, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, come across a monster created of discarded plastics, dumped chemicals, and radiation from nuclear reactor failures. The two stories are different in location, timeline settings, technology and kaiju creation, yet the message is the same: humans are the real monsters.

I also really enjoyed the inclusion of poems. Four are included in the collection covering subjects such as giant wombats destroying big corporations, (no bad thing), civilisations subjugated beneath a winged monster, the problem of creatures with too many heads, (a humorous exploration of who actually makes the decisions) and the overwhelming, earth-shattering arrival of a kaiju, and the realisation that humanity is no longer in charge.

Not every story landed for me, and I won’t go into which ones because reading is subjective, however, the odd one or two that didn’t quite work for me were far outweighed by the ones that I enjoyed. The Big Bad Book of Kaiju is a monster of a collection for all fans of oversized destruction.