Book Review: When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi

I received a review copy from the publisher. This does not affect the contents of my review and all opinions are my own.

When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi

Mogsy’s Rating: 2.5 of 5 stars

Genre: Science Fiction, Humor

Series: Stand Alone

Publisher: Tor Books (March 25, 2025)

Length: 326 pages

Author Information: Website

I kind of miss when John Scalzi wrote more cerebral books. Or at least stories with some real substance, like Old Man’s War, Lock In, or even his Dispatcher series of novellas. Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy his humor, but lately his novels have started to feel more like idea sprints than anything fully developed—just throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks. While it’s an approach that can sometimes be fun (for example, The Kaiju Preservation Society and Starter Villain both had their charms), it’s also starting to wear thin. When the Moon Hits Your Eye is the latest in this trend, delivering an off-the-wall premise with a snappy title and lots of quirk, but unfortunately not much else.

The plot of this book—such as it is—centers on an absurd astronomical event. The moon has inexplicably turned into cheese! Literally! Overnight, the world is thrown into disbelief and various degrees of panic. As governments scramble to respond, experts of all stripes start coming out of the woodwork to weigh in while the conspiracy theorists have themselves a field day. Meanwhile, ordinary folk are left helpless to parse all the noise by themselves, trying to make sense of it all.

And yet, what else is there to do? Life must go on. What follows is a series of chapters focusing on how different people from all walks of life react to the sudden lunar transformation. There are politicians and preachers, authors and screenwriters, billionaires and astronauts, and of course, everyday citizens just going with the flow in an attempt to hold on to whatever normalcy is left. Hence, the result is less of a genuine cohesive story and more of a patchwork of little vignettes, chronicling life in the United States in the time following the cheesification of the moon.

Right away, you can probably guess the downside to this narrative structure. While Scalzi’s intent appears to have been to capture a broad view of humanity’s response, what you end up with is a constant shifting of context and perspective jumps that make it very hard to connect with any of the characters or care about their situation. Some of these people are with us only very briefly, never to be heard from again as the story progresses. Those who do recur do not do so enough to act like anchors in all the chaos. Instead, readers are tossed this way and that like in a storm, with nothing concrete to hold on to.

The entire novel is also built on a premise whose potential for humor is limited and whose momentum is unsustainable. So, the moon turns into cheese, oh cool, ha ha! It’s a novelty that lasted for about five minutes, quickly becoming a tired joke that is laboriously stretched over a few hundred pages. What should have been a quick read instead took me much longer. At a certain point, I had just about enough of the book’s smugness over how clever it thinks it is. I mean, how much torture is one expected to take with the endless parade of groan-inducing cheese puns and juvenile wink-wink-nudge-nudge dialogue? What started as mildly funny quickly became irritating, especially as the novel constantly patted itself on the back even though it rarely provided anything insightful.

Granted, I am probably being harsher than I need to be. To the book’s credit, some chapters do casually wade into deeper themes of grief, mortality, and the fragile nature of human civilization in the face of catastrophe, even if the exploration is surface-level and often undermined by the writing’s tendency for glibness. And yes, there were some laugh-worthy moments here and there. For better or worse, Scalzi’s trademark voice is ever present, and in small doses, I admit it can be fun.

However, the main issue with this book is the way it always seems to be getting close to saying something important, but then backs off at the last moment, never fully committing. And so, what you end up with is mostly fluff but not the right kind for me. Bottom line, I think When the Moon Hits Your Eye would have worked much better as a novella or a proper collection of short stories. As it is, the novel overreaches and tries to be more than what its structure can maintain, so what started off as quirky and cute ends up being awkward and cringe like a joke that fizzles out.