Remember when monster movies were cheesy affairs in which some form of alien "science" creates a horrible creature that rampages through the city for no good reason while people run amuck and try not to get eaten, trampled or other grisly B-movie fate?

Steve Niles does. He just wrote another one.

Niles, the creative mind behind 30 Days of Night, tries again to do something innovative with the monster genre and, this time, fails. Giant Monster is a pointless bit of fluff that does little more than waste a little of your time.

In the very near future, an astronaut on a solo flight is eaten-up-yum by some form of space parasite. However, when the shuttle wreckage crashes to Earth, the pilot isn't really dead; instead, he's bonded to the parasite, which means he grows real big, becomes real dumb and eats or tramples everyone he sees. Can his cheatin' wife stay his destructive course? Can the evil Nazi robot be used for good? We'll see.

It's a popcorn movie in book form, but the popcorn's a little stale, the buttery topping a little too thick. Once you're done reading, you're not really sure why you started.

Art by Nat Jones is adequate to the task without being thrilling.