Devolution by Max Brooks

 

Another epistolary novel about monsters in something like the real world. In this case the monsters are sasquatches, and I guess Brooks does what he can to write them as believable giant-ape monsters, but--alas--the real world is conspiring against him, here. On the other hand, his imagined eruption of Mt. Rainier, followed by a series of lahars wreaking destruction as far as Tacoma, is as best I can tell distressingly plausible; likewise his depiction of various sorts of governmental failure post-catastrophe. I do not know if the USGS has had its budget slashed as Brooks describes--especially in the case of Mt. Rainier, close as it is to population centers, I sincerely hope it hasn't. One of the things people can't stop mentioning in the blurbs is the humor that purportedly exists in this novel: I wouldn't say it's completely thuddingly humorless, but there really weren't any moments of funny, either. That said, it's a really clear-eyed horror novel, set in a moment of plausible social collapse, and it's reasonably well-written.