8 Must-Read Monster Books for Godzilla Fans 

There’s no better place to start than where Godzilla itself started. Shigeru Kayama wrote the original treatments that became the first two Godzilla movies—1954’s Godzilla and its 1955 sequel Godzilla Raids Again—and first published them in novella form around the same time that Godzilla Raids Again hit theaters. Now, both volumes have been collected together and translated into English, so that Anglophone fans of the big G can read about where it all began in an exciting new translation that will bring the original Godzilla films to life in a new way.

If you think you’ve read every kind of murder mystery imaginable, try imagining this novel in which a detective attempts to unravel the enigma of who (or what) could have killed a giant and seemingly indestructible monster. Nineteen years ago, five giant behemoths known as Maydays showed up and nearly wiped humanity out. However, humans managed to prevail and turned the indestructible Maydays into gladiators who battle for our amusement. 

When one of these gigantic beasts winds up dead, however, it’s up to Jay Escobar to find out how and why—and the fate of the entire world might just hang in the balance in this unlikely detective story.

In a lot of ways, dinosaurs were the original kaiju, and Godzilla’s origins are often linked to these prehistoric creatures. So, it only makes sense that James F. David’s Footprints of Thunder should bring dinosaurs crashing into the modern age, as a mysterious natural phenomenon causes the past and present to bleed together and prehistoric monsters to start stalking the streets of modern cities. 

“Fasten your seat belts,” writes the San Francisco Examiner. “You’re in for a bumpy and scary ride when Jurassic Park enters The Twilight Zone.”

John Scalzi is one of the most popular modern sci-fi writers, and in the Hugo-nominated The Kaiju Preservation Society, he turns his attention to one of sci-fi’s most enduring themes—namely, kaiju. It seems that kaiju really do exist, just not on our Earth. Instead, they stalk a warm and human-free planet in a parallel universe. 

However, like any other endangered species, they have their problems, and there are humans who are trying to help… and other humans who want to exploit this situation, with potentially disastrous results in this “wildly inventive take on the kaiju theme” (Booklist).

One kaiju-like creature that makes its home mostly in the pages of books rather than on movie screens is Lovecraft’s Cthulhu—a creature whose awakening usually spells the doom of humanity. But what happens after that? In Ian Tegellis’ novel Necessary Evil, such an end has already come for the world that Raybould Marsh hails from. 

Lovecraftian beings from beyond space have come and all-but wiped humanity off the face of the Earth. Now he is trying to stop it from ever having happened by going back in time to World War II and preventing the Nazi experiments that drew their attention in the first place in this rip-roaring novel from the writer that George R.R. Martin called “a major talent.”

Winner of the Sturgeon Award and nominated for the both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, James K. Morrow’s Shambling Towards Hiroshima posits an alternative history of World War II, one in which a B-movie star renowned for playing monsters is called upon to give his most convincing performance, one in which he’ll be zipped into a rubber suit to play Gorgantis, a fire-breathing monster out to crush Tokyo. 

If his portrayal is good enough, it will convince the Japanese forces to surrender and the Allied armies won’t release their secret weapon—a genetically engineered army of giant, fire-breathing iguanas that will do in fact what Gorgantis only does on the big screen.

Dragons are essentially kaiju that sail mainly above the sprawling worlds of fantasy novels, and since the days when Tolkien’s Bilbo Baggins first went up against the dragon Smaug, they have often spelled trouble. Such is the case in Elle Katherine White’s second novel, where dragons are both friend and foe. 

According to the B&N Sci-fi & Fantasy Blog, “White’s 2017 debut, Heartstone, fused epic fantasy with the manners of Jane Austen so perfectly, she basically created a whole new sub-genre. The sequel picks up the charm offensive where the first book left off.”

Think of this as something a bit like Max Brooks’ The Zombie Survival Guide but for giant monsters instead of the walking dead. Structured and presented like a nonfiction book, The Kaiju Survival Guide gives everything from firsthand accounts of encounters with the creatures—often modeled on familiar kaiju movies—to classification systems, basic biology, and the tools and weapons that humanity has to stand against such titanic enemies (including giant robots). 

The result will be particularly appealing for fans of Guillermo del Toro’s 2013 kaiju opus Pacific Rim, but there’s something here for just about any kaiju fanatic to enjoy.