John Scalzi has never been particularly interested in playing it safe with his fiction. The bestselling author of the likes of Redshirts and the Old Man’s War series has built a readership on stories that take familiar ideas in totally unexpected directions, often with a healthy dose of irreverence.
With his latest novel, Monsters of Ohio, he turns his attention to his home state, where the troubles facing one small town are about to get significantly stranger.
The book follows Mike Boyd, who returns to his hometown of Richland after losing his job, only to find a community struggling with economic uncertainty and the impending closure of its local meat-processing plant. The company behind the proposed closure, meanwhile, is busy organising a Monster Mash festival to improve its public image. But corporate damage control soon becomes the least of the town’s worries when a neighbour’s cow explodes, followed by the neighbours themselves, with the resulting transformations giving a whole new meaning to the term small-town monster. As the bizarre incidents spread to Mike’s own family, he joins forces with an old friend and a local festival organiser to get to the bottom of what’s going down.
ADD TO GOODREADS
To mark the book’s release today, November 7, CinemaChords sat down with Scalzi to examine the real-world concerns underpinning his fantastical premise: the economic decline of small-town America, the grip of corporate power and the complicated relationship between communities and their past. We also discuss the role of political conviction in fiction, the interplay between horror and comedy, and what our ideas of monstrosity reveal about the way we judge one another.
