Kaijumax: Season Four: Scaly Is the New Black by Zander Cannon

When I find myself reading a book in a series, and not remembering all of the details of previous entries, I wonder if it's a failure in my memory or just the passage of time. (OK: it could also be something the creator did wrong, but let's be positive here!)

Luckily, I keep track of what I read and when, so I can see that I scribbled about the previous Kaijumax volumes in June 2017, March 2018, and December 2018. So almost four years: that's a substantial amount of time. It's probably the passage of time.

But this fourth volume of Kaijumax, subtitled Scaly Is the New Black, also features an almost entirely new cast, since it's set in the related prison for female monsters - one major human character from the earlier books is central here, for reasons that even I remembered, and there's I think one other that we've seen before.

So: if you're new to this series, this might look like a good place to start, since the cast and story is mostly new. I'd generally advise against it, since a lot of the plot here depends on the reader knowing some Big Things that happened in previous books. (And I say that with full knowledge that, as I said above, I might be forgetting other Big Things that also should be important.)

Cannon still has that walking-the-tightrope tone: this is not essentially jokey, but it's dancing on the edge of camp. Since it's about giant monsters in a women's prison, it would be difficult to do otherwise. There's also something of a racial allegory going on with the monsters, intersecting with the usual "prisoners join up into gangs based on their origins" prison-story stuff.

We start with some new prisoners arriving. As usual, they're familiar, with Cannon only altering serial numbers slightly to fit his world or to avoid infringing someone else's IP. So there's a monster Lady of the Lake who gave a sword to the wrong person, a Lovecraftian creature that had a good thing going in a Dunwich-esque seaside town, and Dr. Zhang, former prison doctor at the men's location and now a murderer stuck at giant-size due to a malfunction in her suit. The first two slot fairly easily into the factions in the prison; Dr. Zhang does not. She's in much the same position as Electrogor in the first book: essentially innocent, stuck in the middle, wanting just to get out of things they can't possibly get out of. All three will be important to the plot here, all three have powers and abilities and aims and desires that will make things happen, for good and bad (for themselves and others).

This is a prison story, so things escalate. There's some satire along the way, and probably more references to other prison/monster stories than I caught. And this is not the end: there are at least two more seasons already. I don't think I got as much out of Scaly Is the New Black than I could - I don't know Cannon's cultural touchstones, and I think Kaijumax is more and more becoming a thing of touchstones - but I did enjoy it, and I always find Cannon's plotting and character work excellent. So I'll be back for the next one...I hope in less than another four years.