Book Review: Devolution by Max Brooks

 Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre

Max Brooks: Del Rey (2020) 304 pages

Brooks, who had a bestseller with World War Z, has cooked up a story mixing cryptozoology with classic horror and survival tales and some potshots at modern life.  It’s very interesting, but a bit patchy: I like it but don’t entirely love it.

The setup is fun. People move to the tiny ultramodern eco-community of Greenloop, where everything you want comes daily by drone and everything you do has minimal impact on the environment. One family includes Kate Holland, whose journal forms the core of the story,

If most “creature” tales have the moral “Man is the deadliest animal,” this one goes with “Man can be the deadliest animal, but he’s certainly the weirdest.” A collection of colorful folks with absolutely no idea how the natural world works but also want out of the human world are cut off when Mount Rainer decides it’s been dormant long enough and buries a huge area in volcanic mud.  Amid an enormous national disaster that makes Katrina look like a tea party and ensures no one even thinks about Greenloop, days and then weeks go by while people wonder what they will do without their online-ordered support. They don't even own toolchests, much less guns.  

Meanwhile, Sasquatches who’ve been content to live on veggies and venison begin to get desperate for protein. It does not take them long to figure out one of the few protein sources left in their devastated habit is huddled in Greenloop.

A lot of themes unfold in the weeks after the disaster, although there are some poky stretches before we get there. The humans display a mixture of helplessness and imagination.  If not for an artist who seems to know a lot about war, they’d all be dead.  Some of the people evolve under pressure: some crack.  Meanwhile, the sasquatches lose their normal reticence about getting close to humans and “devolve” into sadistic-predator mode.  Brooks does a good job in giving the sasquatches personalities and family/tribe dynamics rather than being indistinguishable monsters. Brooks has read his Bigfoot literature and  ties this story in with folklore and cryptozoology. Sasquatches are not reported to have narrow waists, quite the contrary, and primates don’t have eyes that gleam red in the dark, but Bigfoot fans will otherwise find little to dispute except the question of whether the famously peaceful creatures would devolve in a situation like this. Hunger does a lot of things to people and Bigfoot alike...  

Brooks’ descriptions and settings, including his blueprint of Greenloop (rim shot), are good throughout. So is his depiction of action.  The series of battles marking the town’s last days is gripping.  Tactics on both sides change as humans learn how much squatches hate fire and squatches learn it’s dumb to underestimate even small opponents if they have pointy weapons. (There are detailed instructions on making a spear out of a kitchen knife, which is only one of the improvised traps and weapons that make this sequence cool. It’s like Home Alone with murderers instead of idiots invading.) 

The ending is very interesting. We don’t know exactly what happened to the survivors, but one possibility offered is that humans, too, can “devolve.”  

Brooks works in a lot of commentary, some of it delivered with a shovel, on human philosophy, the urge to cuddle nature vs. the urge to ignore it, the overdependence on gadgets, etc. Not much of that is new, but Greenloop concentrates it all in one place. There’s a familiar Jurassic Park theme with the isolated humans, and it’s not hard to guess who’s going to die first. 

What really makes this novel go is the sasquatches. I wish one of them had been able to keep a journal, too.