Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre

Max Brooks

It’s one hundred percent accurate to describe this epistolary novel as a horror story. It is delightfully gory and unapologetically murderous. It’s also about environmental issues. And capitalism. And our reliance on technology. And how social order is established and breaks down.

The setup is a nod to golden-age crime classics for the tech-bro era. A group of people move into a smart-home community called Greenloop, built in the shadow of (volcanic) Mount Rainier. This ultra-modern homestead is the brainchild of a tech billionaire — think Elon Musk with more integrity or a more nature-oriented Steve Jobs. He envisions the community as one that lives in harmony with nature while taking advantage of digital privilege. A group of eleven strangers — all with their own secret reasons to be there — have settled in this would-be paradise.

Then Mount Rainier erupts — and their man-made Shangri-la is cut off from the rest of the world. And that’s when the Bigfoots show up.

To say any more than that would ruin the fun. But you should know this: The author of this book is Max Brooks, the creative mind behind the best-selling satirical how-to guide The Zombie Survival Guide and the novel World War Z. He’s very good at using horror tropes to interrogate serious topics and developing characters we want to see succeed.

The hero and primary narrator of our story is Kate. On the advice of her therapist, she’s trying to manage her anxiety — and her ambivalent feelings about her husband — by keeping a daily journal. She dutifully chronicles her nature walks, observations about the other residents of Greenloop, and later, details of her Bigfoot encounters. Her diary is raw and vulnerable and captures what many of us would feel when we know we’ve been chased by a big, hairy cryptid but can’t possibly have been chased by a big, hairy cryptid.

Her neighbors are a passel of mismatched strangers, including a couple in their 60s who are vegan (and really want everyone to know it), a lesbian couple (both psychologists) with a weird power dynamic and an adopted daughter caught in the middle, a pretentious male author, an older glass artist with a witchy vibe, and the founders: the tech guru and his wife, a model-turned-yoga teacher GOOP wannabe.

Their story unfolds via Kate’s journal entries, along with interviews, news reports, real-world Bigfoot research, and excerpts from Teddy Roosevelt’s 1893 memoir The Wilderness Hunter. The veracity of it all will have you frantically turning to the internet for answers on what’s real and what’s fantasy.

This whole endeavor is a hoot and feels like a mashup of travelogue and disaster memoir — all of which is meant as a compliment. If you like slasher movies, or enjoy Michael Crichton’s style of hot-take on technology and gore — like Jurassic Park — you’ll get a kick out of this one.

Mount Rainier is out of a storybook. The white peak rising in the distance. The morning light turning its snow an orange pink. You’d expect a princess to live in a castle on the summit, or an angry dragon to sleep under its base. Sounds crazy, but I feel strangely safe every morning when I see Rainier, like it’s watching over us. I know the tremors we’ve been feeling (we’ve had one or two since that first time at dinner) are coming from the mountain, but I can’t reconcile them with this protective giant ruling all he surveys. — Max Brooks

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