Some books defy easy categorization. Some books require the reader to sit back and trust the author’s storytelling. Some books take disparate elements that don’t seem to make sense and blend them together for a unique experience. Wild Massive by Scotto Moore is all three. At various moments, it could be classified as science fiction, fantasy, or horror. It’s a wild mix of idea, character, and fun. This is a book that when I try to describe it, sounds like it shouldn’t work, but it does. Wild Massive by Scotto Moore is an amusement park ride turned into a book.
Disclaimer: The publisher provided a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Any and all opinions that follow are mine alone.
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TL;DR
Wild Massive by Scotto Moore describes the lives of the inhabitants of a reality-warping building that may actually contain all of reality, except for the bits outside. Follow Carissa as she navigates increasingly difficult obstacles on her journey to live a peaceful, secluded life in her elevator. Thrill as a species of shapeshifting creatures fight for their freedom against the tyrannical building association. Enjoy a book that defies description. Highly recommended.
From the Publisher
Scotto Moore’s Wild Massive is a glorious web of lies, secrets, and humor in a breakneck, nitrous-boosted saga of the small rejecting the will of the mighty.
Welcome to the Building, an infinitely tall skyscraper in the center of the multiverse, where any floor could contain a sprawling desert oasis, a cyanide rain forest, or an entire world.
Carissa loves her elevator. Up and down she goes, content with the sometimes chewy food her reality fabricator spits out, as long as it means she doesn’t have to speak to another living person.
But when a mysterious shapeshifter from an ambiguous world lands on top of her elevator, intent on stopping a plot to annihilate hundreds of floors, Carissa finds herself stepping out of her comfort zone. She is forced to flee into the Wild Massive network of theme parks in the Building, where technology, sorcery, and elaborate media tie-ins combine to form impossible ride experiences, where every guest is a VIP, the roller coasters are frequently safe, and if you don’t have a valid day pass, the automated defense lasers will escort you from being alive.
Wild Massive: The #1 destination for interdimensional war.
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Review: Wild Massive by Scotto Moore
Carissa lives a secluded life in an elevator riding up and down the building, avoiding the Association. Her life is interrupted when a shape-shifting wizard lands on top of her elevator car. This shapeshifters is being chased by zir people, and Carissa teleports the elevator to a different floor in the building. Her plan is to leave the shapeshifter at a different elevator so that ze can take it down to the Association’s floors. But the nearest safe floor has a different elevator located in the middle of a Wild Massive amusement park. Meanwhile, in the background, the building spanning Association is currently fighting a war with the shapeshifter’s people. Carissa hopes to dump the shapeshifter and get back to her life alone in the elevator. Instead she gets swept up in events that will rock the very foundations of the building, maybe even the foundations of reality itself.
Wild Massive by Scotto Moore features both first and third person points of view. It features magic, technology, superheroes, aliens, angels, the multiverse, a giant corporation that makes one wonder what Disney would look like if Old Walt based it on a bad acid trip, and, most important, roller coasters. Moore calls the various sections of the book Seasons and the chapters episodes. Each episode varies in length and pace; sometimes the reader is on a roller coaster ride; sometimes it’s the bumper cars; and sometimes the episode is a reality-bending equivalent of “It’s a Small World.” (This is a compliment. Some people actually like that ride.) Like any ride, it’s a book to sit back and let the author take you where he wants to go.
Let the Ride Take You
The Tower Contains Reality Itself, I Think
Rereading
Wild Massive is a massive book. I know I missed clues and setups that Moore weaved into the story. It’s a book that with each rereading will make a little more sense each time. I’d like to reread this again to see if I can figure out the story earlier than I did.
Moore does a great job dishing out world-building in palatable doses. He mixes mythology with plot and with exploration of character in a balanced way. I’d like to explore how he does that. How does he misdirect on the earlier clues? What explanations did I miss that would have clarified the story?
Stories
Wild Massive is a weird story in the best way. At it’s heart, it’s about how stories affect reality, even the stories that don’t get told. Carissa’s past is a story that’s covered up, and the very absence of her story affects the reality of the building and the war taking place within it. That’s how it works, right? What we know and don’t are our reality. It’s why the internet has fractured our political culture; we might exist in different realities due to our different media sources. What those sources leave out of a story can be almost as powerful as what goes into it. The questions that our media fail to ask our politicians also shapes our reality. Wild Massive understands that.
Interestingly, the title of the book is the same as the title of a mega-corporation inside the book. Wild Massive is a media conglomerate, like Disney on steroids and ‘shrooms. It’s mascot is Helpless the Bunny, whose origins are as an addict. Wild Massive creates and runs the amusement parks but also a centuries spanning intermedia series, Storm and Desire. The corporation controls a number of media outlets that serve their purpose, including the themes and rides in their amusement parks. Moore doesn’t just indict government’s influence on media; he’s concerned with corporate influence as well. How do the storyboards in writer’s rooms affect us? As Moore is also a playwright, I bet he has a bit to say about economies of scale and the effects on storytelling. Massive corporations have much more reach and much more influence than local theaters and independent publishers. Does society value these big corporate stories more? Or are they just exposed to them due to good marketing? Are the media tie-ins at amusement parks, the internet, or wherever distracting us from more intimate tales?
Conclusion
Scotto Moore’s Wild Massive defies simple description. The closest that I can come up with is that it’s weird in all the best ways. It begins as organized chaos that evolves into a story about survival through cohabitation. It’s about storytelling. It’s about the need for a good roller coaster ride. It’s about all that and so much more. Highly recommended.
Wild Massive by Scotto Moore is available from Tordotcom on February 7th, 2023.
© PrimmLife.com 2023