There Are No Giant Crabs in This Novel may not be completely truthful about its contents, but it absolutely lives up to the sardonic nature of its title. The fifth installment in author Jason Pargin’s series that began with John Dies at the End opens with Dave, John and Amy being called to the parking lot of a once-and-future Spirit Halloween to investigate a mysterious pile of dismembered limbs that has appeared seemingly from nowhere. But as Dave, who still has both his arms despite the appearance of one of his hands in the pile, can attest, no one is missing the body parts. To make things weirder, the trio is soon visited by a deadly stranger who claims to be hunting a dangerous predator from another world known as the Penetrator. When the Penetrator turns out to be exactly as lethal as the stranger promised, Dave, Amy and John are pulled into an interdimensional war likely to rain destruction down upon our own world—assuming that the United States government doesn’t decide to wipe the trio’s small town off the map first. Although it’s the fifth in the series, There Are No Giant Crabs in This Novel can largely be read as a standalone story and is a fantastic entry point for readers curious about Pargin’s off-the-wall humor and absurdist plot twists. From the quandaries about whether to trust your own interdimensional twin to humorous takes on the reality of life in small-town America, Pargin merges a serious eye for human nature with the sort of antics you might expect from an adult version of Scooby-Doo.
Despite some occasionally gory sequences, John Scalzi’s Monsters of Ohio is nearly gentle in contrast. Set in the fictional town of Richland, Ohio, Scalzi’s latest science fiction horror-comedy shows how the stresses of capitalism and modern politics can literally transform a small town into something unrecognizable. Mike Boyd, newly unemployed in his late 30s, returns to his hometown with no plans to stay for the long term. But small towns have a way of drawing you back in, and Richland is no different. Dave, Mike’s childhood best friend and the current sheriff, soon pulls him into an investigation involving a slew of missing pets, an exploded cow and the closure of the town’s meat processing plant. As the two work to figure out what strange force has taken over their town, the pressures in Richland begin to come to a head, forcing a transformation many years in the making. In Monsters of Ohio, Scalzi showcases his unique brand of wry humor and canny understanding of the human—and particularly American—condition, switching easily from scathing commentary on private equity takeovers to meditations on love in middle age to everything in between. Throughout it all, Scalzi asks readers to determine for themselves who the real Monsters of Ohio are.
From interdimensional war to chemical spills, both There Are No Giant Crabs in This Novel and Monsters of Ohio take readers on journeys through dying strip malls and companies stripped for parts by rapacious capitalists. But instead of focusing on the suffering of small-town America, Scalzi and Pargin have decided to highlight humor and humanity alongside very real (although sometimes absurd) horrors, both modern and cosmic.