Kaiju novels are a lot of fun. In particular, I enjoy the crazy and extravagant descriptive language used by authors to construct their towering colossi. The books are rarely scary, but the earthshaking monsters are always a hoot.

If Gamera-like “gigaanna” are a staple of the genre, why would an author write a kaiju novel and deemphasize the monsters? That’s a question I’d like to ask Lachlan Walter, the author of We Call It Monster.

Don’t get me wrong, there are giant monsters in his book, but they’re peripheral at best. Even more disappointing, Walter clearly has no flair for the material. His kaiju are relentlessly generic. For example, here’s how he describes the first creature to stomp across Sydney, Australia: “It was a massive green-and-black thing,” he writes in the first chapter. “Its body was almost barrel shaped, the same as that of a gorilla or a wrestler.”

Later, Walter catalogues a bunch of creatures spotted during a jungle expedition. “A dragonfly as big as an eagle,” he begins. “Ants as big as dogs, millipedes as big as guinea pigs, Christmas beetles as big as basketballs, stick insects the size of a dining table and a wombat as big as a small car.” Like all newspaper editors I’m a big fan of simple declarative sentences, but writing like this is dull and maddeningly perfunctory.

To be fair, the author has an agenda above and beyond most monster novels. Along with global destruction, he’s telling a story about love and loneliness and commitment and survival. For him, the kaiju are the catalyst for poetry. Good on him.

He may have a lot to say about the human condition, but he struggles throughout the book to give his creatures any sort of unique identity. At some point he just gives up. “They were monsters, plain and simple,” he says. “No amount of jargon or doublespeak would change that.”

In one chapter, a group of strangers assemble on a hill to watch a thunderous Kaiju Big Battel. The problem? The giant monsters are the size of a thumbprint because they’re twenty kilometers away. That, in a nutshell, is my biggest complaint about We Call It Monster. Even if I thought it was a serious rumination about the eternal human spirit (which I don’t), the novel itself is still a bust. The monsters are destroying the civilized world, but the author reduces them to pint-sized specks on the horizon.

[We Call It Monster / By Lachlan Walter / First Printing: February 2019 / ISBN: 9781925840520]