Scalzi didn’t flesh out his characters (human and monster alike) or include any high-adrenaline thrills. His income isn’t enough to pay his rent and life is looking like something found behind a dumpster in a Manhattan alley. Fortunately, there's a direct and accompanying side effect of extreme lassitude, which keeps most people from acting on the urge. This is a tight, short tale that’s masterfully written to give you the scares, the chills and the laughs and all the feels.

It was, perhaps, too heavy on the back and forth dialogue explanations on occasion, but it more than made up for it with a plethora of heart-pounding action scenes.Told with his trademark blend of humor and imagination, this is science fiction that provides exactly what it promised – giant monsters, banter, and a plot that packs some surprisingly thoughtful moments into all that. I have read some books before by Scalzi which I have enjoyed but when I read the reviews for this I couldn't resist it and was really looking forward to it.

The villains in this tale are not people with any form of bigotry, Scalzi doesn’t use that as a point of conflict which I very much appreciated.As a result, the story is action-packed and fast-paced, but Violet is a strange mix of pure competence and total passivity, always managing to come out on the winning side. In this unusual pandemic novel, a young person—whose gender is never specified—is given a unique, literally out-of-this-world opportunity to escape the Covid-19 lockdown. A story that hits all the beats and tropes you might think, and that's not a criticism: you read this book with the feelings you read a tropey romance, ie a knowing expectation of what will happen, plus gleeful anticipation for how you're going to get there.