Nearly half the novel goes by without a single Sasquatch sighting. Brooks hammers this point home over and over again– which becomes really tiresome, really quick. The residents of Greenloop have no guns, no tools, and no food, despite being hours away from civilization. World War Z definitely had a “Norman Rockwell, with Shotguns” ideal driving it forward, and Devolution is the same way. It’s honestly not as wide-ranging as World War Z, but again, the book is focused on a single town as opposed to a global undead plague.Īnother thing Devolution shares with World War Z is a heavy-handed neo-luddite streak. These journal entries are interspersed by snippets and interviews from other sources in order to provide more context about the disaster and/or Bigfoot lore.
Most of the book takes the form of journal entries by a woman named Katie, Greenloop’s newest resident. Like he did in World War Z, Max Brooks plays around with false documents in Devolution. And that’s before the starving, man-eating Bigfoots show up.
When Greenloop is cut off from the outside world by a volcanic eruption, Greenloop’s residents find themselves woefully unprepared for the disaster. It’s populated by a handful of useless West Coast stereotypes: the vegan couple, the tech-bro millionaire and his supermodel girlfriend, the arrogant professor (who’s explicitly described as looking like George R.R. … with certain exceptions.ĭevolution is set in Greenloop, a tiny planned “Eco community” somewhere in the Washington wilderness. I figured it’d be interesting to see what Brooks would do with Sasquatch myth, given that not many people are writing about Bigfoot these days. That boom could honestly be a whole blog post of its own, but I digress. Max Brooks, son of legendary comedian Mel Brooks, first came on the scene with his Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z, both of which were key works in the early-2000’s zombie boom. Like, in a ranking of horror icons, I’d put Bigfoot somewhere below “Giant Spider” and maybe above “Evil Dentist.” Bigfoot’s relative horror-obscurity didn’t stop Max Brooks from writing a book about it, however! In fact, I kind of wonder if that was part of the appeal, as Brooks could tread new ground in Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre. Bigfoot, however, is fairly low on this list. At the top you’ve got classics like Vampires and Werewolves, and even some new additions like the shambling, Romero-style Zombie, and so on, and so forth. Whether you look at it through the lens of how many movies a particular critter gets, or how many costumes they sell at Halloween, it’s plain to see that some are just more popular than others.
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