Brooks informs us that he was tipped off by the brother of the missing Kate Holland to her last testament-a diary she’d kept when she moved to the tiny, idyllic, ecotopian town of Greenloop (population: 11) on the eastern slopes of Mount Rainier.
It’s a docufiction, found-footage-style account.
That realism pays dividends it makes easier the suspension of disbelief required for reading a ‘Bigfoot-Destroys-Town’ story, in this case a story that is not just believable or entertaining, but even morally compelling.ĭevolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre is, more or less, what its name suggests.
It’s a feeling we nighttime wanderers have all had, and Brooks captures it eerily. He vividly and realistically depicts his characters’ split-second reactions when, wandering around in the dark woods of the high Cascades, they see things in the night, but can’t be sure of what they saw, or that they saw it. It is to this serial nocturnal wanderer’s great anxiety, then, that the inimitable Max Brooks has given us a vivid, visceral depiction of what a sasquatch might do to you. What, exactly, was I afraid a sasquatch would do to me, if I ran into one? The primal fear that some damn dirty ape might be stalking me amid the firs and hemlocks was never particularly well-defined, though, beyond the vague, hairy, hulking figure of cartoon lore. One of the mind’s-eye darkness-monsters I’ve feared since my youth as a Boy Scout in the Pacific Northwest has been, predictably, the sasquatch. You’re more sensitive to the texture of the ground beneath you, to smells you hadn’t noticed before shadows seem to twist and turn as though alive, and if your mind’s overworking itself, you might feel you’re being watched. Your hearing does as well, and you realize just how loud nighttime nature is. Your night-vision perks up, only a little, but discernibly. It is only human to be scared of the dark, although that doesn’t stop some of us from occasionally wandering alone around the woods without a light, on a moonless night, for no particular reason. Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre,” by Max Brooks, (Del Rey, 2020), 304 pages.
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