You want a “found footage” tale following a volcanic eruption in the American wilderness? You want that to tell the blood-soaked story of a small community, cut off from civilisation and stalked by a group of sasquatch? (sasquatches? sasquatchi?) This is a fast-paced, action-packed absolute page turner about a group of people trying to survive until help arrives. It’s an easy-reading brutal bigfoot story about what happens when 2 predators are forced into each other’s environment. I think I read it in about a day.

I've had this in my to read pile for sometime now (a scary five years) and I've finally got around to reading it! After the eruption of Mt Rainier a small community finds itself cutoff and under siege from a previously thought of mythical displaced species. Told in the same style as world war z this is a very enjoyable horror novel. The characters are great with some rather biting satire thrown in. The plot cracks along and the book is suitably gore filled to satisfy horror fans. Good fun and well written. Love to see max Brooks write a other novel someday.

This was a story based around the supposed existence of "Bigfoot", one of the names of this humanlike being.. There is an volcanic explosion of Mount Rainer which moves the population, both human and animal into a safer region.. This impinges on a develop of people who are attempting to be elf sufficient in power, with very little outside contact.. The humans and the Bigfoot clash with catastrophic results for both. Very open ended Conclusion but a great story.

This was very much a book of two halves for me. I found the first half a bit slow and sometimes tedious, but the second half was incredibly fast paced and utterly compelling. It tells the story of the aftermath of the Mount Rainier eruption on a small community of wealthy individuals living in Greenloop - an eco-friendly commune of sorts. Told in a variety of media, including the journal of Kate Holland, one of the residents of Greenloop, we piece together the story of these six families and the terror that stalks them in the woods. I liked the style, although there were definitely times when I found it a little hard to suspend my disbelief that this traumatised woman would have such clear recall of events for the diary. As I said, I found the first half of the book pretty slow and the people were all pretty obnoxious (intentionally so), which made it difficult to get invested in their story. However, once the action really got going and the Sasquatch started to appear (let's be honest, we're reading this for Bigfoot) I couldn't put it down. The diary format had a real visceral quality to it and added to the dread, as did the interviews interspersed into the narrative, which took place after the fact. This book isn't going to change anyone's life, but it does have some interesting things to say about how we interact with our surroundings, how inhospitable nature can really be and how quickly our modern sensibilities can be jettisoned when there is a genuine threat. Overall, this was entertaining and compelling and I thoroughly enjoyed it! I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Devolution is Max Brooks’ first novel for adults since the phenomenally popular World War Z, which detailed (with a scary level of insight) how the world coped in the wake of a large-scale zombie outbreak. Brooks has changed up the subject matter this time around though, with nary a shambling corpse in sight. Turning his attention instead to the perpetually camera-shy Bigfoot, the action centres around the fledgling eco-community of Greenloop, established in the woods surrounding the nearby Mount Rainier and largely made up of telecommuters. Prior to reading Devolution, I knew nothing about Mount Rainier, so for anybody in the same position as I was: it’s an active volcano near Seattle, considered to be one of the most dangerous in the world because of the amount of glacial ice covering it. Should it erupt and this ice be disturbed, it’s thought that it could produce huge lahars (highly destructive mudflows) that could cause widespread devastation and loss of life. Of course, Mount Rainier blows, trapping our principal narrator, Kate, and the rest of the community in their fancy new digs. I call Kate the principal narrator because Devolution is written in a similar style to World War Z, though is more of an epistolary novel, using Kate’s journal as a starting point and supplementing it with interviews with experts. The eruption itself is familiar territory for Brooks, a natural disaster making not only a perfect narrative device with which to trap his characters but also allowing him the opportunity to demonstrate the prodigious research skills that make his work feel so real. I looked up some of the facts that Brooks features in Devolution. They’re real, at least the ones I checked. Whilst the community itself and the eruption are entirely fictitious, they both feel entirely plausible too, with fiction and fact once again blended seamlessly. But the eruption has other, entirely unanticipated consequences for the high-minded idealists of Greenloop. Driven out of their habitat in the wake of the eruption come another community quite unlike theirs, and they are hungry. It’s a classic horror movie setup really, except with sasquatches instead of, say, hillbillies, and brought bang up to date with its Green New Deal espousing protagonists and their technology reliant way of life. Struggling to survive without the regular grocery deliveries by drone and driverless electric van that they’ve come to expect – as well as having to rely on their own knowledge rather than their smartphones – puts Kate and her neighbours in a precarious enough position as it is. Being set upon by a tribe of ape-like monsters tests them to breaking point. The explanations that back up the idea of the sasquatches themselves, along with the supporting verifiably true facts I mentioned earlier, mean that this is not only just as visceral as World War Z, it feels just as believable. More so, if anything. Speaking of getting visceral, it’s not a spoiler to say that things get pretty bloody – the tagline for the book, after all, is “A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre.” But exactly how this unfolds is what makes this a deeper reading experience than you might initially think, going by the description alone. It’s not as simple as “Monsters come, people get killed horribly.” Focusing on a relatively small cast of characters, Devolution is much more of a character study than I expected it to be. How the characters interact with one another, the shifting of roles in their group dynamic, how their own personal histories inform their decision-making processes; all of these are carefully built up and feel utterly believable. The way the group cope (or in some cases, fail to cope) is reminiscent of Lord of the Flies or The Beach, with their circumstances forcing them to make difficult decisions in order to survive. “Devolution” refers to much more than just the savage creatures hunting them, with desperate times calling for extremely desperate measures. It’s societal collapse, in microcosm. Thankfully, nobody is stockpiling all the toilet paper, otherwise it really would be too close to home. With a nuanced cast of characters, an engaging format and his usual enviable ability to craft a wholly believable story out of the fantastic, Max Brooks has breathed new life into one of the most enduring urban myths in the world. He might not be the most prolific author out there, but when his books are this good, I really don’t mind waiting.