Will it kick start a sasquatchenaissance in the same way that The Zombie Survival Guide helped to revive zombie mania in the early 2000s? Maybe, but it probably doesn’t deserve to.ĭevolution employs the same fictional non-fiction approach that World War Z did, although with a much more low-key premise. "Devolution’s" mocking attitude toward its characters comes at the cost of its suspense.Following the success of The Zombie Survival Guide, World War Z and a book about how if you find yourself in a world of mines and crafting the most important thing you can craft is you, we now have Devolution, which is jumping on board the increasingly-hot bigfoot scene that’s inexplicably growing in America. It’s not clear just what the author intends us to feel: Are we supposed to be rooting for the self-satisfied residents, or for the displaced killer Sasquatches? The answer could be neither. If the author had written the characters more endearingly, or with more humor (as Maria Semple did for a similar milieu in her "Where’d You Go, Bernadette"), the satire might work, but it’s a head-scratching combination with this horror story of brutal killer apes. The community of Greenloop is progressive living run amok, “all these overeducated, isolated city dwellers who idealize the natural world.” The inhabitants hit the page as cartoonish liberal clichés, played so broadly that it’s hard to care much about any of them. Brooks ("World War Z") is a master at setting up tense moments, as when Kate stares out into the woods, scanning for enemies, “trying not to memorize every tree, rock, patch of open space, to see if any of them change between glances.” It’s hard to imagine Kate, in a race against time to defeat murderous apes, regularly pausing to scribble down hundreds of pages of observations and dialogue.ĭiary-form problems notwithstanding, the action sequences are riveting – the hulking Sasquatch creatures make for thrillingly fearsome opponents. This “found document” technique has produced many great novels, but overreliance on the diary form in particular comes dangerously close to making "Devolution" implausible from the start. The bulk of the novel is made up of the journal entries of Kate Holland, as she recounts how her few isolated neighbors were massacred by a tribe of killer beasts.
"Devolution" (Del Rey, 282 pp., ★★ out of four) is presented as a compilation of primary sources, from interviews with forest rangers to NPR think pieces, that the author is using to piece together the fate of the residents of Greenloop. After Mount Rainier erupts, an affluent community is cut off from civilization – and soon finds itself beset by bloodthirsty Sasquatch creatures.
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