Down on his luck, Mike Boyd returns to his small hometown of Richland, Ohio recently laid off and looking for a new direction in his life. Upon his arrival he learns that Richland is about to lose its major employer to a private equity firm and the residents are struggling to get by.
And then things get really interesting: reports of animals acting strangely.
And then people.
You’ll need to read for yourself what comes next and prepare to have your expectations challenged. This is John Scalzi’s new novel, Monsters of Ohio.
Scalzi is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling science fiction author of 20 books, which include the Old Man's War series and Starter Villain (2023).
In a recent What We're Reading interview Scalzi talks about his new novel, reflects on a career in writing, and shares how important it is for him that people have fun reading his books.
And fun is just one way to describe Monsters of Ohio. Despite the ominous premise, the book is a little weird, kind of gross, and strangely heartwarming.
That’s just what Scalzi intended.
“Spoiler alert,” he warned, “There are monsters. They do live in Ohio in this book and how they arrive onto the narrative is a little bit weird and it is a little bit gross. I'm not writing a horror book here. I'm just using many of the tropes of horror, particularly body horror, to tell the story that I want to tell.”
Scalzi set the fictious town of Richland in Dark County which is an actual county in Ohio where he lives and has spent his entire career as a science fiction writer.
“Old Man's War, which was my debut novel, was written here and every single book since then as well. And so, I've had time to get used to what it's like to live in rural Ohio. And I wanted to tell basically the story of ‘What's going on in rural America today?’ Scalzi said.
Twenty books have made their way into the world from his small town in Ohio, and Scalzi isn’t stopping anytime soon.
He explained, “The ideas are never the issue. The thing that's the issue is: what are the ideas that are interesting to me? What are the ones that my brain really latches onto and builds out from there so that when I sit down to write, I'm having fun exploring the idea and a novel will come out of that.”
If Scalzi is having fun writing, he knows readers will have fun reading.
“Whatever idea there is, whatever story I'm telling, I want you to turn the pages and be excited to find out what happens next. And the only way that happens is if I'm there when I'm writing it—still really excited to be like, ‘Oh, and then this is what happens next. Oh, and then this is what happens next. Oh, and you thought this is where it was going? Surprise! We're taking a sharp left turn.’”
Learn more about sci-fi writer John Scalzi on his website. Monsters of Ohio was published by Tor Books.
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