Book Review: Tsuchigumo: A Kaiju Thriler

On Amazon, this book is listed as "A Kaiju Thriller", and more specifically as a "Project Arachne novella book 1" and was first published in November of 2015.  Since then, the author has released two other books:  Blue Moon (a Jeremy Walker Thriller), and Kaiju Epoch (described as "Blue Moon side stories").  A new author tackling More than one series at once?  That's pretty ambitious.  I wonder if there is some influence from Jack L. Chalker (who I think was the reigning king of running multiple science fiction series simultaneously for a long time - James Patterson might be the current king in thriller-land these days), Philip Jose Farmer, Jim Butcher, or Jeremy Robinson.  But none of them did this right out of the gate - they published a few standalone novels first.  As of the writing of this post, Titan's Unleashed (Jeremy Walker #2) was recently released, and it looks like the second "Project Arachne novella", titled Chimera, will be released sometime in 2018 - I can already say I'm going to want to read it when it comes out.

Tsuchigumo is your typical giant monster movie (in the tradition of Godzilla - but this takes place in America) in book form.  If you look at the cover closely, you can tell that the monster is a giant spider (you may need to enlarge the image).  The author is a HUGE fan of Jeremy Robinson's Project Nemesis series (as am I).  Originally, Blue Moon caught my eye on Amazon, but then I noticed a comment from the author that Tsuchigumo is his best reviewed book, so I took a chance on that one first.

I did enjoy this story, the characters, and the fact that it mostly takes place near Roswell, New Mexico.  While the story itself does not break much new ground, there were original elements to the story that kept it entertaining.  There are several interesting aspects to the monster - some of them were very unexpected for me.  I will also state that it is very obvious that this is the authors first novel - there are many spelling and grammar mistakes throughout the book, but the story was engaging enough that I was able to easily overlook these issues.  That is saying something - even with all those errors, I was still interested.  Over the years, there have been many books, some of them considered "classics", or on occasion they were Hugo or Nebula award winners, that I have given up on when less than 50% of the way through - they just couldn't keep me engaged.

While a giant spider isn't exactly an original monster form, the "character" of the monster *is* very original, which makes this unlike any giant monster book or film that I have experienced, so some credit is due here.

At this point, this is the only book by this author that I've read, and I hope that his writing continues to improve in future books.  I know it's possible, as other authors have gone through this experience.  Read the foreword to Jeremy Robinson's The Didymus Contingency - then go on to read the whole book, because it's great!

At some point I expect to be checking out Blue Moon, but it may be a while before I get to it.