There’s a specific moment in life when pop culture gets imprinted on your brain forever. It’s a period when movies, books, music (and everything else) sticks to you like bubblegum on the bottom of a shoe. My wife, for example, has an undying fondness for Duran Duran. For me, the primordial soup of my youth includes Charles Schulz, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth and Mad magazine. 

For author Dustin Dreyling, his influences are pretty transparent. His latest novel Primordial Soup: The Second Batch is clearly the result of a childhood spent watching kaiju and super robot films, playing video games and listening to hardcore 80s metal. 

Continuing the storyline from Primordial Soup: The First Batch (read my review here), the world was being crushed by the “horrible things” being created by competing biotech companies. Chicago, St. Paul and Minneapolis, in particular, had been reduced to fiery pits filled with rubble. 

Demons, vampires, were-creatures, changelings, trans-dimensional beings, spirits, the Great Old Ones, Elder Things and even biblical Nephilim were all mixed together in Dreyling’s second batch of hybrid monsters. Add a pinch of human DNA and it was truly “a new recipe for disaster.” 

Like the first installment, Dreyling doesn’t skimp on the action. The first 120 pages are basically an extended “Daikaiju Big Battel.” In addition, the monsters themselves represented the craziest menagerie of creatures I’ve ever seen. For example: “the cheetah-terror-bird-griffin combo” or “the reptile-squirrel-goat monster” or “the furry snub-nosed monkey-shark-frog hybrid.”  

All of these gigantic, man-made pests needed to be exterminated, but militaries from around the globe couldn’t contain the mega-beasts. The U.S. deployed a squadron of impressive 20-foot-tall robotic tanks that looked like something from a Japanese cartoon. But even these super robots ultimately failed. 

Mankind’s only hope for survival came with the arrival of a giant monsterbot named Volk’narr. Living on the dark side of the moon since the Cretaceous Period, his galactic assignment was to protect Earth at all costs. With an array of awesome otherworldly weapons at his disposal, Volk’narr immediately got to work killing daikaiju chimeras.  

As a result, the mechanical galactic soldier quickly became a global sensation. Said Dreyling: “Pictures of the giant robot went viral. He had become the closest thing to a superhero the world had ever seen.” 

Volk’narr was a hero, no doubt about it. But he wasn’t the hero that we all needed. Spoiler alert: His mission statement said nothing about saving humanity. He had come to Earth to save the planet but not the people living on it. I’ll be interested to see how things shake out in Primordial Soup: The Third Batch. 

[ Primordial Soup: The Second Batch / By Dustin Dreyling / First Printing: June 2025 / ISBN: 9798990366183 ]