Not to be all Fight Club on you, but the first rule of writing is, "Read." A lot.
It’s a good rule, though its not one I necessarily had to learn. My parents instilled in me an early, longstanding love of the written word. They assured me that I would go to college someday, regardless of how I happened to feel on the matter. And I’m sure that by the time I reached age five they were more than a little tired of me calling them into my room whenever I needed someone to read subtitles.
As a writer, I gravitate toward the very things I read: speculative fiction, old and new. Highbrow or pulp classic, I don’t care. All reading is good reading because even the worst book in the world can teach you something. Like what not to do in your own writing, possibly the most important lesson of all.
But while my writing falls within wide bounds, my subject matter (at this point, at least) is limited. By necessity, to be sure, but by interest as well. Some things just push the button for me. Some push the button and proceed to lean against it. Those concepts are my oldest and dearest loves.
One of them, as anyone who reads my movie reviews can surely guess, is the giant monster movie.
I say “movie” there only because the more general term, “giant monster story,” would probably seem foreign to my general audience (both of you). Hell, the damn thing even looks strange to me, of all people. Many would see the phrase as a contradiction in terms.
With the cost of making movies rising every year, and the cost of buying them rising just as fast, it’s a wonder more writers haven’t taken up the torch. Our special effects budget is as infinite as Santa Claus’s net worth. Yet few rise to the challenge giant monsters represent, and those that do rarely achieve the kind of credit their hard work disserves.
At the very worst, they miss a wonderful opportunity to throw open the genre and expose it for the vaunt of universal truth that it could so easily become when guided by the hands of an expert.
Ken Hollings, author of Destroy All Monsters is quite the expert. His book's title alone should establish that he is a fan from way back with an abiding love for his subject matter. And quite the misguided soldier, as well. In the time I should be taking to read my homework I am instead re-reading his work, having finished it sometime in the summer of 2004. Back then, my mind was absorbed in work and that rabid clusterfuck of a joke so blithely labeled a Presidential Campaign. The constant barrage of current events reduced me to a drunken stupor come election night. I hated every moment of it and I didn’t give Mr. Hollings book the attention it disserved.
I remember not liking the book as I finished it. I reached the bottom of the last page and felt strangely…empty. You can do stuff in prose that the average Hollywood jerk-off can’t even comprehend. Why do you think they’re always screwing up and making crappy movies out of good books? The writer in today’s movie making scheme might as well be an indentured servant…unless he is also the executive producer. The power to cut checks is a mighty arrow in some quivers. I want pretty pictures I’ll call in a flock of visual artists. But, damnit, when I want a story I’ll call a storyteller in and put his ever-expanding ass to work.
Though even that is no assurance of quality. Holling’s Destroy All Monsters is quite the case in that point. While I appreciate anyone brave enough to take the monster genre on, to get “lit’rary” with it, if you will…I’m not going to let that stop me from offering constructive criticism. Because it seems to me that giant monster authors are suffering from a common malady. I don’t mean the bird flu (though that’s coming, don’t worry). It’s more of a tendency toward overkill. An exuberance. Grab every toy on the shelf and play with them, by God. All at once. Because God only knows when a writer will get the opportunity to have this much fun again.
Destroy All Monsters is exactly what the title implies, an old story. Body-snatching aliens (one of which has found a comfortable home inside the Vice-President of the United States) seek to conquer a wacky, parallel Earth. It’s the kind of mish-mashed past/future Earth we see in comic books, superhero cartoons and giant monster movies of the late 1960’s. Like Japan of yore, this Earth has confined its giant monster population to a single, fortified island in the South Pacific: Earthquake Island. No longer do giants wade through cities. The creatures are studied, observed and contained…until, as the back cover of Jurassic Park so succinctly put it, something goes wrong.
But even before that Something throws all the world into chaos, Hollings spends a great deal of time informing us that Things Aren’t Going Well. Operation Desert Storm, in this crazy piece of the multiverse, has dragged on for almost half a decade. The President of the United States spends all his time moping about Burger King, haunted by the memory of his dead grandchildren. Months ago, at the Smithsonian, he watched helpless as a giant praying mantis/robot tore them apart like loaves of bread. It’s the kind of image that sticks with you (certainly still with me). The Vice-President, and the alien within him, are growing quite annoyed with their nominal superior’s mourning. It’s only a matter of time before the alien takes matters into the Vice-President’s hands.
Meanwhile, within sight of Area 51, a compound armed cultists is a’waiting for the End Times. In Memphis, Elvis Presley is reborn as a bastard child of cybernetic science and Artificial Intelligence technology. On Earthquake Island, DARPA is conspiring to uncover the Next Big Thing in weaponry from within the world’s monsters. And a female android named Muri is murdering her way through Tokyo for reasons she later states bold-faced:
“The monsters tear cities apart…I tear people apart. None of us can help it.”
Which is all well and good…but unasked is a burning, crucial question, one no book has ever asked, and no movie has the heart to.
Why?
Why tear a city, or a person, apart at all? Anger? Revenge? Cold-blooded pleasure? All of the above? I’d be fine as paint of that were the case, but none of Hollings’ characters think to ask. He allows them to hide behind that, “None of us can help it,” thinking this statement will wrap everything up. He’s obviously not banking on obsessive philosophical junkies, like yours truly, dissecting his work for some form of Deeper Meaning. For me, that “None of us can help it,” is a missed opportunity to examine the heart and soul of the giant monster story. At best it’s a hollow answer, not to mention a total cop-out. But Hollings’ is out to explore anything. He’s got far too many toys to play with and a sandbox the size of the universe.
With at least seven monsters (including Muri), an alien invasion, and an ensemble (hell, near-Dickensian) cast of humans and demi-humans under his command there’s far too much going on inside Destroy All Monsters for any consideration of issues. No time to pause and ask questions amid the rapid, hallucinogenic perspective shifts. The book is a rollercoaster of stark, sparse prose that can convey entire scenes in a sentence. However, this cuts the other way whenever Hollings brings about a concept (or an entire secondary character) that absolutely requires some necessary exposition. The debt he owes to post-modernism allows him to play the plot fast and loose, while simultaneously freeing him from the need to explain or justify anything. Rare is the chapter that lasts more than two pages. Rare is the dialogue exchange uninterrupted by action of one sort or another. DAM is the kind of book that jumps scene just as things have started to get interesting. This allows the book move at Flash-pace but keeps character identification down to a minimum. Voices begin to bleed together, especially once the more colorful characters begin to die in the climactic mayhem. At 316 pages it’s a fast, empty read. The kind of book you can finish in a weekend and forget all about within a week.
Is this what we want? Is this the best literature our favored genre can inspire? Post-modern, deconstructivist bullshit filled with empty, smarmy characters tossing one-liners at one another across shattered cityscapes? Can we not do…better?
I think so. For one thing, some of us already have.
I refer to Marc Cerasini, a YA fiction author and Tom Clancy protégé of some repute and mid-list talent. Back in the late 90s Cerasini turned out four Godzilla novels for Random House, ostensibly to celebrate the release of the American Godzilla movie. I remember this period as the golden age of giant monster literature…shortest golden age in history, perhaps, but nevertheless, at least it was there.
Cerasini quickly fell pray to the same temptations that sink Hollings, but his first attempt Godzilla Returns (1998) is a stark, realist examination of a giant monster rampage in the post-Cold War, pre-nine-eleven world. Godzilla, the only monster present, explodes from the page as a raging force of nature we all know and love. Cerasini’s knowledge of military hardware, and his attendant command of techno-speak, adds some tasty real-world flavor to the action without becoming the story in-themselves.
However, Cerasini’s pulls the real hat trick with his treatment of the human insects scurrying about Godzilla’s feet. Every character in that slim bugger of a book (234 pages, soaking wet) is realized with a depth and focus Ken Hollings can’t match. Ken’s canvas is too crowded for the kind of detail Cerasini spends on his characters. Most of it is spent in awkward, expository prose, but this is YA fiction, after all. We can’t expect continuous miracles.
Both books are prototypical “Monsters Are Attacking Tokyo” stories. Both build reflections of the real world and reign holy monster hell upon them. One fascinates, the other confuses, then bores.
The difference is one of moderation. No, Destroy All Monsters cries, there’s no time for moderation. How could I, a pitiful reader, question the author’s right to turn his plot into stew? After all, its not as if we should expect to enjoy our reading experience. Where, Destroy All Monsters asks, did I ever get that crazy idea?
My parents. But whatever. That's neither here nor there.
Destroy All Monsters is, finally, not a book about characters, or conventions, or themes, or even ideas…save one, and it’s so bloody obvious it probably escaped Hollings over the course of his writing. The book’s Idea rings particularly true for me since I’ve been aware of it for as long as I can remember—about age six.
Simply put, any universe the features giant monsters is a universe where anything can happen. Where the rules do not apply. Rules of physics, gravity, society and science are thrown hell bent into all four winds by the mere presence of a Altasaurus (Godzilla) a Manda, the Reptile Wing (Rodan) or an Eiga, the Dream Monster (one of Hollings’ better, if more nebulous creations). Once the reader accepts their presence (and if s/he is to get past page one, s/he must) than the green light is on for all sorts of craziness.
Robot zombie Elvis? Telepathic dogs? Size-changing androids with a taste for leather and human flesh? All these and more, equally ludicrous concepts, can easily share the spotlight with three hundred foot tall, fire breathing lizards. Only one other field of speculative fiction—superhero stories—comes close to possessing this sheer degree of stretchiness. Such is the elasticity of giant monster stories, as a genre. And it is here we find Destroy All Monsters’ downfall, and its unrealized potential. For once you know for a fact that you can at last do anything the temptation to do just that is as strong as gravity. Just harder to overcome.
It’s a temptation I’ll have to war against myself. Because I know we, as speculative fiction writers, can do this genre better. I also know that I can do it better and that I have already begun to do so.
