Neither campy nor creepy

Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre Max Brooks

Del Rey

Max Brooks’s book, Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre, marks a significant change for the author, who is a well-known expert on zombies. In 2003, Brooks published The Zombie Survival Guide, and his 2006 book World War Z was later made into a movie starring Brad Pitt.

With Devolution, Brooks brings his investigative powers to a cryptozoological controversy that has been raging in the Pacific Northwest for decades. “I will let you,” he writes, “judge for yourself if the following pages seem reasonably plausible.”

Some of the elements of this story do seem plausible. Brooks includes factual footnotes, interviews with a park ranger and excerpts from Teddy Roosevelt’s memoir, The Wilderness Hunter. But the meat of the book is a document of questionable provenance: a diary retrieved from the site of a grisly massacre in Washington state.

The author of this diary is a missing woman named Kate Holland. She and her husband, Dan, were members of a small group of tech pioneers who joined a utopian community called Greenloop. The six smart homes, powered by methane gas from the occupants’ poop, are the epitome of the green revolution. The founders, a tech guru and his yoga-teaching wife, have anticipated every contingency, so there is no way anything could go wrong.

Things immediately go wrong. First, Mount Rainier erupts with a volcanic explosion, which takes down the community’s internet and cellphone service.

Only one of the group is truly ready for what’s coming: an older woman nicknamed Mostar who survived the Bosnian War. At the first sign of trouble, she starts rationing food and cutting spears from bamboo. The yoga instructor, meanwhile, is protective of the forest animals.

Given the stories of Mary Shelley and other masters of the macabre, Brooks is trying to fill some big shoes. The results are uneven.

We want our horror either campy or spooky, but Devolution plods along a dull middle ground. We get the nervous declarations that there’s nothing to worry about. We get the strange sounds that are probably just a raccoon BUT ARE OBVIOUSLY NOT A RACCOON. Trouble is, all these conventions of the trapped-inthe-woods frightfest are now well known.

And with the diary format, we’re stuck in Kate’s limited perspective and trudge through her flat prose.

But at least when the Bigfoots (Bigfeet?) finally start attacking, the mayhem is satisfyingly ferocious and gory.

There’s probably a great horror novel about Sasquatch out there somewhere, but I won’t believe it until I see it.

The Washington Post