Disposable Lit Reviews

Signet, 1987
235 pp.
ISBN 0-451-15055-4

Buy it from Amazon.com
or eBay or Half.com

Bear with me here, I’m formulating a new idea, and it might still be a little fuzzy around the edges:

Sometimes, the best part of a novel is the hardest part for the writer to tackle and stay with. Call it “high concept,” if you want, or the “central conceit”; whatever it is that gives the story its hook — and may even have been the hook that made the writer want to devote all that time to the novel in the first place — is often skirted in the complete text, dealt with in a perfunctory manner instead of mined and… Well, I don’t want to say “exploited,” because, you know, negative connotations. But too often that’s what happens: The unique and compelling part of the novel’s conception is left as uncompromised high ground, while the main narrative noodles around in the shallows.

Case in point: Lawrence Yep’s Monster Makers, Inc. begins by introducing us to Godzilla. A twelve-inch Godzilla. With a squeaky voice. This mini-Godzilla is a portfolio piece by our protagonist Piper Kincaid’s father, who runs a small custom bio-design film on an outlying colony planet. And yes, Godzilla does pretty quickly go on a “rampage” of sorts, escaping from his pen on the island laboratory, found at sea, and taken by spunky heiress Shandi Tyr to the nearby mega-resort, where he burns his way through several dining rooms and ventilation ducts.

Now, granted, it’d be damned hard to maintain the level of cool inherent in a mini-Godzilla wreaking havoc on the vacation paradise of the rich and famous. Which may be the problem: When the initial “high concept” is so nifty that it just can’t be sustained. So the novel we get, after the initial scenes, only involves Godzilla as a sideline prop; in fact, most of the “fabricants” are never seen at all. Instead, it turns out that recent equipment failures on the island lab have actually been sabotage caused by the forerunners of an alien invasion, mainly because said forerunners have been disguised as household pets, and Monster Makers, Inc. is the only lab on the planet with good enough genetic scanners to tell the infiltrators from normal pets.

Even that sounds pretty good, right? But that also gets established by the halfway mark, and most of the rest of the novel is filled with pretty unimaginative adventure, as young Piper is forced to find and defeat the alien secret base, almost single-handedly. (For a non-humanoid species, these aliens — to Xylk — are too damned human, right down to their elevator design, their cafeteria practices, and the porn magazines they sneak around with.) Along the way, he and Shandi naturally bond, both being creatures out of their element, and in big chunky introspective scenes, Piper has to deal with his failure to live up to his father’s high standards and his internalized guilt over the death of his mother.

In other words, while most everything is passable as a paperback SF novel, nothing lives up to the level of cool promised by — nay, demanded by — a foot-tall Godzilla with a squeaky voice who’s been trained to burn down cardboard “buildings” whenever somebody says, “Tokyo.” The novel would probably be better off without Godzilla at all, so that the mere adequacy of the rest of it wouldn’t be thrown into such sharp contrast.

(And don’t even ask me how this novel got into print without the publisher being mobbed by a team of ninja trademark attorneys from Toho Studios.)

Nathan Shumate