Syms Thorley – B-movie star, professional mummy, American hero, narrator of sci-fi lifer Morrow’s latest novel – has been conscripted by the U.S. Navy. It’s 1945, pre-V-J Day, and Truman is wary of unleashing America’s most hellish weapons. Not Little Boy and Fat Man, not yet; first the Navy has a small horde of Godzilla clones ready to incinerate the Japanese shores. So a deal has been struck: before the giant, fire-breathing mutant lizards rampage in the East, the Navy invites a convoy of Japanese emissaries to demonstrate the power of its new secret weapon, and persuade Emperor Hirohito to surrender.

Enter Thorley – a man best known for his portrayal of movie monsters Kha-Ton-Ra the mummy and alchemical creature Corpuscula. Due to a series of military mishaps, the only way to execute the ruse is to have Thorley don a rubber Gorgantis suit and stomp and obliterate his way through a model Shibuya. A man of great ambition but an even greater thirst for alcohol, he takes the job and the $10,000 pay check with it but eventually realises the gravity of his task. If he doesn’t put on the performance of a lifetime, it could mean the death and destruction of hundreds of thousands of people.

No book has captured the strange brew of jolly satire and moral indignity of vintage Kurt Vonnegut so well. A slapstick sense of humour – yanked straight out of midcentury monster cinema – dominates. Just before the big diplomatic matinee, his director instructs him: “Sink their fleet. Smash their planes. Crush their artillery. Melt their tanks. Break a leg.” But an encounter toward the end of the book neatly brings all of the actual horror of World War II to the surface. And with it, it’s not only Thorley’s mask that drops.

Jonathan Messinger