I like monsters. Werewolves are my favourites but I also like sasquatch, hell-hounds, moth-men, killer bunnies and Nessie. And we really don’t see enough good monster fiction.

Monster, by Frank Peretti, is not good monster fiction. Instead its Christian creationist propaganda disguised as monster fiction. And the worst thing is, I didn’t know it until I was halfway through the book.

Gay fiction, women’s fiction, African-American fiction all gets ghettoised to their own little sections of the bookstore or library. Please, for fuck’s sake, do this with the Christian fiction. I’m not up on my Christian authors. I know just enough about the genre to avoid that Left Behind guy. So I wasn’t privy to the fact that Frank Peretti is the evangelical nutcase from hell… er… heaven.

He looked normal in his bio picture. Bearded and ruggedly handsome. If he’d been holding a bible or wearing a big-ass cross around his neck, it might’a clued me in to what he was up to. But no, there he was looking like everybody else. Thats the problem with those christians - they blend. Its hard to pick’em out in a crowd.

His bio was no help either. No mention of fanatical mouth-foaming or bible thumping. Just an ordinary sounding bio. In fact there was nothing anywhere on the book to indicate that I was holding, right there in my hands, a buncha moralizing hooey.

Now I don’t out and out hate christians, or their fiction. I have picked up christian fiction in the past - the New Testament for instance - and enjoyed it very much. But I want to know, dammit, that thats what I’m reading. But through the first half of Monster, Frank Peretti pretends he’s writing everyday horror fiction. Oh sure, there’s not any swearing in the book, but I actually didn’t notice the lack of swearing at first, which is, I suppose, a testament to Mr Peretti’s prose-crafting skills.

And he does indeed craft some very fine prose. The writing is cinematically vivid, as crisp and clear as the Idaho forest where the book is set. But the prose alone is just not enough to carry this travesty.

The story begins when Reed Shelton and his prissy, make-up toting stereotype of a good christian wifey go on a camping trip. She’s carried off in the night by something big and hairy, and the rest of the book involves Reed’s hunt for his helpmeet. (Thats what they call’em, ain’t it?)

Now I won’t lie too you. I was kind of hoping, when I started reading this thing, for some hot, interspecies romping in the forest. Of course, this being a Christian book and all, that didn’t happen. No, the wifey, Beck, eventually learns to communicate with her captors, a la King Kong, while Reed tromps through the forest in search of her.

The characters were stale, dimensionless and stereotyped. Pardon me, Mr Peretti, but your sexism is showing. And your racism too. It seems there are only two kinds of Native Americans in Frank’s world - the christian kind, and the whooping, hollering, crazed with booze and superstition kind.

And scientists… evil, evil all evil. All of them, down to a man (except the christian one) are conspiring to cover up all evidence that creationism is true! And what, exactly, is this astounding evidence? Ah… that mutation is never beneficial. Tell it to Mr Magneto, Frank.

Whereas the first half of the book had the potential to be an adventurous romp, the last half sank into silliness and tedium with its evil science conspiracy, its endless wandering through forest, its parade of mediocre characters and its alpha-male bigfoot who never got a hard-on.

There are maps at the end of each chapter that show you where the action occurs. The idea seems clever at first, but by the end of the book you just don’t care. About the where, or the who, or even the why. You just want it to end.