Monster — Manic creature feature with messy audio

People usually tell you that author-narrated audiobooks are the gold standard. "They know exactly how the sentence should sound," my librarian friend likes to say. I usually tell people that writing and voice acting are two very different skill sets, and rarely do they meet in the same body. Neil Gaiman can do it. Most others should stay behind the keyboard.

With Frank Peretti's Monster, I'm honestly torn between those two philosophies.

I listened to this while cleaning the gutters on a Saturday—a task that feels surprisingly high-stakes when you're forty-something and afraid of heights. I needed something loud and fast to distract me from the fact that I was twenty feet up on a ladder. This book is definitely loud.

Here's the thing about Peretti as narrator: he commits. He doesn't just read; he performs with the manic energy of a camp counselor trying to terrify twelve-year-olds around a fire. When Reed and Rebecca are hiking into the woods and that first "unearthly wail" cuts through the silence, Peretti sells the absolute panic of the moment. He understands the pacing of his own chase scenes better than an outsider might, accelerating his delivery until you feel frantic just listening. It's not the refined, tea-sipping narration you get from the British actors I usually listen to. It's raw.

But—and this is a big "but" for anyone who listens with noise-canceling headphones—the audio production has issues.

There were moments where I had to check if my earbuds were broken because the audio felt... wet. The research calls it "mouth noises," which is a polite way of saying you can hear the mechanics of his speech a little too clearly. It sounds like he needed a glass of water about three chapters ago. There's also a bit of slurring in the high-speed sections. When the action peaks and the genetic experiments (yes, we go there) are on the loose, words sometimes bleed together. If you have auditory processing issues, this is going to be a hurdle.

The character voices are a mixed bag too. His narration for Reed is fine, mostly just his own voice turned up to eleven. But the female voices veer into caricature territory, and the villains sound like they're twirling mustaches that don't exist. It borders on comical, which cuts the tension right when you're supposed to be terrified of the creature lurking in the dark.

The production tries to help out with some sound effects at the start of chapters to set the mood—a nice touch that reminds me of old radio dramas. It works for the B-movie vibe of the story. This isn't high literature; it's a creature feature with a theological engine under the hood.

If you want adrenaline-heavy Christian fiction with a sci-fi twist and don't mind rough-around-the-edges audio, you'll have a blast. Skip it if mouth noises drive you crazy or you need polished character voices—the production quality will pull you out of the story. It's essentially Predator for the Sunday School crowd, but with enough genre fun to keep a public school teacher like me entertained. The Christian fiction genre has more range than people give it credit for—Mother and Son: The Respect Effect sits at the quieter, more reflective end of that same shelf, and I found it surprisingly worth the time. Just maybe listen on a speaker instead of earbuds so the mouth noises don't feel like they're inside your own head.