I have just finished “Devolution” by Max Brooks. It was fine, although I was disappointed by the lack of easter eggs regarding a certain band from Akron, Ohio. I’ll just have to assume that the blurb on the cover reading “one of the greatest horror novels I’ve ever read,” is a reference to that writer / reader not having read a lot of horror novels. Some of the folk who review horror fiction on twitter and elsewhere and refer to themselves as belonging to the “horror community” hold out that negative reviews are a bad thing and should not be engaged in, that they are a disservice to that community. That is a load of shit. I love horror, but I subscribe to Sturgeon’s law that 90% of everything is crap. When it comes to the things I love, the figure is probably more like 94.3% (if we are going to get precise and arbitrary). Life is short, time is short, and a bad review is a good thing if it means that as a reader I don’t waste precious hours on more crap. That is a great service to the horror reading community.

However I don’t have anything snarky to say about this book. It was interesting, the setup for its creatures was good, and there was some true nastiness. I liked that the narrator was very flawed and did not start off as a hero at all, she had an interesting journey. If I was going to critique, I’d say that some of the interludes of interview and extracts that intersperse the journal entries that are the thrust of the novel diluted the tension, and could have been shorter, especially the extract from the book by a fictional IDF officer. Somewhere Anthony Burgess writes that end of the world books are doomed as art projects from the start, because who is left to write the novel? I never have a problem with that, I love good apocalyptic fiction (again, Sturgeon’s law), but this book certainly showed the limitations of the “found” novel. As Bram Stoker showed in Dracula, if you write an epistolatory novel, you need to make sure there are enough characters involved so that someone is left to write the ending. I can live with ambiguity and uncertainty, I just don’t think that it was a great pay off here.

I did not enjoy it as much as I enjoyed World War Z, and I suspect I have over reacted a little to the over praise of the blurbs from famous folk. I don’t know though why Max Brooks hates Australians. I can understand the Mel Gibson put down (do we still claim him as Australian?), but I really do not know why the de-evolution of influencer Yvette Durant, who starts as a leader of the beleagured group then immediately disappears and dissolves when the going gets tough and the pack of sasquatch attack, is not left to her becoming a human skeleton through constant use of her elliptical exerciser. No, her complete collapse is revealed by “her accent, upper class English, gone. This new one, old one, a thick Australian twang”. That is the end product of the de-evolutionary process, the result of human regression is this creature now equipped with an Australian accent. Brooksy, you had the whole of North America to pick on, leave Australia alone!

I enjoyed it, but I wouldn’t rave about it. Now that’s going to dent the sales of a 4 year old novel that is no doubt going to be made into a film any time soon.

If you want true horror, another novel featuring Bigfoot was also released in 2020 – Stonefish by Scott R Jones. A near future cosmic horror where being eaten by a monster in the forest is probably the least of your concerns. Everything is hungry, everything eats, but its not just your flesh you have to worry about. What if you were to be punished by a loved one being removed from existence – not killed, but every trace removed, so that only you remember them and the deep love that you still feel, while questioning your sanity? What if the physical world could be removed at a whim, suspending you in the void? What if the most intelligent post-human creature you could imagine could be reduced to a whining shadow fixated on masturbation? And there is Bigfoot, popping up here and there to play with his own shit.

Sigourney Weaver in an interview said a danger with the Alien movies was reducing the xenomorphs to tigers – fierce, scary predators, but in the end they just eat you like they do other prey. I read Brooks’ bigfoot horror story as similar to a group besieged by big, smartish lions or tigers, ie pretty scary. I read Jones’ bigfoot horror story as a revelation of a reality that rips away our skin and pulls out our eyeballs so that we can truly see. I am still thinking about it 4 years later.