Well this was certainly a wild something something.

Delivering exactly what it says on the tin, Kristopher Rufty’s Bigfoot Beach is a gory (so gory), over-the-top (so over-the-top) summer slasher that happens to feature a colossal cryptid in lieu of a murderous maniac.

While I can certainly see the appeal for these kinds of stories, at the end of the day it just wasn’t for me. Despite its characters being considerably more fleshed out than in the standard Syfy creature feature fare, it never rose above its schlocky horror movie premise enough for me to fully engage with it. I had a lot of issues with it, mostly in terms of the writing and plotting, which is fine and serviceable for most of the book but then would go on these truly baffling tangents (mostly of the sexual kind, which I understand often comes with the territory in these types of stories, but it kept popping up in sequences where it had no business popping up — for instance, having a character who has just witnessed an old friend being torn apart immediately ogle a woman’s behind for a paragraph or two).

Still, Rufty does have a knack for going all out with the action set-pieces here, which are fun and ludicrous and chockfull of imaginative, gruesome kills and honestly sometimes that’s all you really want out of a monster book.