AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Mike Boyd is stopped at a gas station in Richland, Ohio. He's holding up his credit card but hesitates to swipe.
JOHN SCALZI: (Reading) Mike Boyd is thinking, you see. And what he's thinking about is irony - about how one day, life is, if not grand, at least going tolerably well, all things considered. And the next, you are standing in front of a gas pump in your old hometown, trying to decide how much of your current total wealth you want to commit to a full tank of gas.
RASCOE: He's been laid off from a cushy job with the federal government in D.C., but he soon finds out his hometown is struggling too. The local factory is about to shut down, and there's also something very strange and gory happening to the livestock. "Monsters Of Ohio" is the latest novel by science-fiction writer John Scalzi. He joins me now from member station WYSO in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Thanks for being here.
SCALZI: Thank you for having me.
RASCOE: Richland feels like a pretty typical Midwestern small town. But times are tough, right?
SCALZI: Yeah. Absolutely. And that is, of course, the case in a lot of small towns in Ohio and elsewhere in the Midwest. I live in a town called Bradford, Ohio, which has about 1,700 people in its rule, and we have a whole bunch of challenges. And what I wanted to do, having lived in Ohio for 25 years - I moved here in 2001 with my wife, whose family is from here - I wanted to actually put a little spotlight on a area that I don't think gets explored very often at the moment in literature, certainly not in science fiction. But that sort of small-town milieu and what it's like to live there, where everybody has their own set of concerns, where everybody has their own sets of problems, but at the end of the day, what they are is a community. And what they are trying to do is find a way to make it work.
RASCOE: And I have to say the book feels very 2026. You've got a government worker who's been laid off, and then you have this town that the main source of employment is being kind of run down by private equity firms. And, like, it felt very of the moment.
SCALZI: That's because it is very of the moment. I wrote it in the last part of 2025 and the early part of 2026, and I was very definitely taking inspiration from what was going on in the world at the time. One of my very good friends was a member of the federal government. They were told that they should take a extended retirement, so to speak. And all of those things that are going on with Mike are things that friends of mine had happen. Their jobs were taken away. They tried to figure out what their future was. They realized thousands of other federal employees were in the same boat as they were. And a lot of them went home to wherever home was - in this case, Mike Boyd going back to Ohio.
RASCOE: And Mike heads home, but there are some strange things going on, as we mentioned. And it starts with this 911 call about a cow. What happened to the cow?
SCALZI: (Laughter) Well, what happened to the cow is the cow got stressed. And the cow got stressed because its owner, a little boy named Jeremy, has heard from his parents that, because of the situation with the economy and the fact that they couldn't sell the soybeans that they were growing at the price that they needed, that they were going to have to sell their cattle as well, which included this cow that Jeremy raised from a calf. What happens in the course of the book is there's a lot of stress in the environment. There's a lot of stress in town. There's a lot of stress in people's daily lives. And what happens when people are stressed in this little town of Richland, Ohio? Well, something that people don't expect. And that also includes, in this particular case, the livestock.
RASCOE: The book is called, you know, "Monsters Of Ohio." So without giving anything away, there may be some monsters around...
SCALZI: Yes.
RASCOE: ...Right?
SCALZI: Absolutely. There will be monsters, and guess where they will be. Probably in Ohio. Yes.
RASCOE: Is the problem in Richland that people have bottled things up, that they just can't really communicate, and then things come out or explode? Like, is that part of the problem?
SCALZI: That is absolutely part of the problem. I mean, we live in a time now where everybody does have that stress. Everybody is worried about the economy. Everybody's worried about their family. Everybody's worried about their jobs. We have been politically divided such that often it's hard for neighbors to talk to neighbors anymore. And so that isolation, that stress - it has to go somewhere. In the real world, a lot of times it goes into social media and people yelling and forwarding weird memes that have been generated by AI. And in the book, the stress and everything that goes with it goes out in a completely different way, in a transformative way. It turns people into monstrous versions of themselves, or so it would seem.
RASCOE: You've written a lot over the years. I think this is your 20th novel. You also have a blog that you've written in regularly since 1998. It's called Whatever. Why do...
SCALZI: (Laughter).
RASCOE: ...You keep posting there?
SCALZI: I keep posting there because I have things that I want to say. The thing is that I'm very fortunate to have a career writing novels. And as exciting as that is, and as many opportunities as it gives me to talk about things in life and in my own set of interests, I used to work in newspapers. I had a nationally syndicated column back in the 1990s when I was writing for the Fresno Bee. And so I got used to that sort of medium for expressing my opinion. And then in 1998, I was like, well, I'll just do it online until somebody hires me again to be a columnist. Well, nobody hired me to be a columnist again, which was fine because that left space to become an author. But I still had things I wanted to say, and so that serves that purpose.
RASCOE: The book does have a somewhat political message. But it's a hopeful one, or it could be seen as a hopeful one. What do you hope readers will take away from it?
SCALZI: Well, I think you're right. I mean, I am a fundamentally optimistic person even though, in many ways, it's a pessimistic time. But I believe, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, Americans will do the right thing. They just have to do everything else first.
But the thing that I really want to take - that I really hope people take away from this book is that community matters. The people that you live with are the people that you spend your life with. What it comes down to is when your neighbor needs help, are you going to be there for them? The optimism, I think, that comes out of the story is despite what is being done to the town by forces outside of it, the community comes together and works to help save itself. And I think that that's what everybody is going to have to do. At the end of the day, all we have is each other. And wouldn't it be great if we looked at our neighbors not as political rivals or as aliens, but as the people that we rely on day to day?
RASCOE: That's John Scalzi. His new book is called "Monsters Of Ohio." Thank you so much for joining us.
SCALZI: Thank you for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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