The Kaiju Preservation Society is about a masters graduate who loses his job and falls into doing menial labour (via a loosely-rebranded Uber Eats stand in) when the pandemic hits. His job brings him back into the orbit of an old friend from college, who hits him up with the mysterious job opportunity of a lifetime. After preparing his will and getting shot full of vaccines, he’s whisked away to a world of nightmares to, in his words, ‘life heavy things’. It turns out he’s part of a secret organisation tasked with preserving Kaiju – keeping them safe, studying them, and occasionally helping them get randy, baby, yeh.
It’s all fun and games until these nuclear-powered monsters fall into a larger and commercially-driven fiasco that sees realities bleed together and the Kaiju put at risk.
As with other audio books by Scalzi, this was voiced by Wil Wheaton. Unfortunately, I’ve overdosed on his voice-overs recently (since listening in quick succession to his reading of The Interdependency series), so the audio book was not the right way for me to consume this story. Characters between the two stories bled and the snappy sarcastic banter that connects both was a bit too much of a good thing.
I was prepared to be a bit scathing about this book and how simple it was, but then I listened to the ‘Authors Note’ at the end. Long story short: The Kaiju Preservation Society (or KPS for short) was Scalzi’s answer to the hell of the pandemic. He found himself unable to continue with a laborious, serious tome that he was working on and instead pivoted to the light and fun KPS.
I wish this was a foreword, as it would have put me in the right mindset to just sit back, relax, and enjoy the bonkers chaos of this book. Instead, I approached it all wrong. My expectations were not met, and so the book didn’t hit the mark for me.
I would recommend this novel to others as a palate cleanser after a more heavy read; however, I cannot give it more than 2 shotgun shells out of 5 (but I blame myself entirely for that rating!).