A thrilling and cataclysmic collection of city-smashing titans and the desperate coalitions of humanity clinging to survival in the wreckage, from the New York Times-bestselling and multiple award-winning editors.

Featuring bestselling and award-winning authors such as Tananarive Due, Christopher Golden, Seanan McGuire, Scott Sigler and Steve Alten, author of The Meg.

An explosive collection of monster terror, featuring 25 original tales of creatures the size of skyscrapers. See cities shattered and worlds ended, as great beasts rise from the deep.

The Big Bad Book of Kaiju is edited by Jonathan Maberry and Henry Herz. Published by Titan Books (September 22, 2026).

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

Kaiju are, officially, an international phenomenon. That was true before this book, of course, but Titan Books' anthology of kaiju short stories is deliberately international. (In fact, only one story in here, “Tachi-Gami,” is by a Japanese author, Taiyo Fujii. If there's any one thing that links most of these writers, it's that they're nearly all award-winning, and indeed some of the names will be very familiar to readers of dark fantasy and horror, such as Tanarive Due and Seanan McGuire. (Both of whose stories are excellent, it must be said.) That makes this a good collection not just for the kaiju fan, but also for fans of genre fiction and some of the authors in particular. From that standpoint alone, this is impressive.

It also, I feel, would have worked a bit better as two shorter anthologies. Clocking in at 400 pages, the use of kaiju as a theme means that things start to feel a little repetitive after a while. While each author makes the subject matter their own, the majority of them still use kaiju in basically the same way: as the harbingers of humanity's doom, brought about by humans' own actions. Since the original Godzilla novel set that precedent, it's hard to complain, but there are just so many of these tales that it gets heavy very quickly. Still, some authors do very different things with their plots – Scott Sigler's “Kaiju Poo Poo” is unabashedly gross, while Ai Jiang's “Shedding Season” goes in a very different direction by asking what happens to shed kaiju skin. Of particular interest to anime fans, though, is Alma Katsu's “Don't Tell Me How to Love Kaiju,” which uses the idea of kaiju forming bonds with teen boys, who then use them as weapons, as a way to explore the mecha genre – and what happens when a teen girl is the one a kaiju bonds with.

Of the more typically-themed tales, the opening story, “Hum” by Lee Murray is the standout. Set in Murray's native New Zealand, it explores what creates a kaiju in the first place, using an uprising of children in a New Zealand where a corrupt politician has proclaimed himself king as a way to show that the world has its ways of making people listen. It's unsettling and upsetting, but it needs to be, and it's very much a story that hits hard when read in 2026, which is probably why we need to read it.

The Big Bad Book of Kaiju may be slightly overlong, but it's still a good anthology. Kaiju stories, it shows, can spark important conversations, and this book is no exception.