Monsters of Ohio by John Scalzi
Publication Date: November 3, 2026
Summary from Netgalley:
Welcome to Richland, Ohio. Things aren’t great.
The town’s biggest employer is closing shop, and Richland’s on the brink. It’s where Mike Boyd, with his own set of problems, finds himself returning to after decades away.
He’s not planning to stay.
But Richland has other plans for Mike, his old friend Dave, and a newcomer Andi. They’re caught in a swirl of local troubles, private equity, executive theft… and something extremely weird involving Jeremy Keller’s prize cow.
Welcome to Richland. Leave your expectations behind. Bring a tarp.
ARC provided by Tor Publishing Group via Netgalley for an honest review.
Confession:
This story is exactly what I expect from John Scalzi. It is funny, strange, weird, horrifying and yet it is a cozy read. But it is also a satire about what ails our modern society and how corporate greed can be the more horrifying than any monster.
The story takes place in a small Ohio town, and like most small towns these days they are struggling. We meet many people in this town, those that grew up here and stayed and even a few that have recently moved to town. All of them are average people who are just worried about making it through another day, week, month. Most are worried about losing their jobs when the local meat processing plant closes. Tensions are high when things start to explode, literally.
The opening chapter is told from the perspective of a rabbit, which was well done. Many of the things the rabbit thought and did seemed pretty rabbitish to me. But the story quickly moves to the humans after that. The story is mostly told through Mike, who has returned home after losing his government job, Dave, the local chief of police, and Andi, a recent transplant to the town. But we also get chapters from various other characters, including the villains of the story. All of the characters, even the ones we only get glimpses of, are well written and feel like real people with real lives and emotions. Even the villains felt fully realized.
This story is not in itself a horror story although there are some squeamish parts. It is about many things like corporate greed, executive theft, small time life and communities just trying to survive. It is a satire and a critique of all of our social ills and how things are in America today. But there are a lot of tentacles, and monsters, although the monsters are not the villains in this story. In fact, the monsters end up being more human than most of us.
I did find the ending a little underwhelming. I just felt like I didn’t get enough of an explanation of what was really going on with the monsters and how it connected to the company that had taken over the meat processing plant. I just sort of wanted a bit more in that respect. Otherwise I really enjoyed the story and the characters.
Fans of Scalzi and his weird and strange humor will really enjoy this one. If you enjoy books that are a bit on the strange side, you just might have found your match in this one.
