"Hey, editor, I need this self-styled beta gregarious city girl with no spine to become a leader to advance my point; also, I need her to write an improbable journal to keep the reportage architecture of my novel from crumbling down, but the style of the journal keeps slipping into novel narrative."

"Please, writer, be my guest. I am too busy playing Portal to give f*ck about the stuff you write. This one is gonna sell as bread anyway, with From the Author of World War Z written all over the blurb."

"Ok then, I was thinking of inventing a character, kinda Old Wise Motherly Figure, with the sole function of giving the Narrator a jump-start as Survivalist Leader, and then everybody else just starts following the narrator for no apparent reason. And the maladaptive husband is suddenly revitalised by the Call of the Emergency..."

"Wasn't that Melancholia? You know, Von Trier's movie. He told that story already, probably better. No offence. Oh, whatever. I have to go now. I made it to GlaDOS's chamber. Do as you think best. Through in a psycho child psychologist, whatever. Talk to you later."

Keeping in mind that some variation on this dialogue MUST have taken place at some stage of its development, this novel is not bad brain chewing gum, at all. Good page turner. Great idea, entertaining development, fascinating ending.
The concept of the hunting instinct being re-awakened, or awakened for the first time, in a species (sasquatches, and not only them...) by external forces such as a famine or the appearance of a predator is interesting, though I don't know whether it is also scientifically sound.
The description of humanity (a very small group of them, but still...) losing its firm grip on the first rung of the feeding chain's ladder is well delivered. Chapeau to that.
The idea that a person can undergo deep changes, sometimes for the better, when confronted with a cultural shock resounds quite well with me, with the caveat that you don't ALWAYS reveal your true self in a disaster, as Max Brooks finally openly states, after rubbing our faces in it for three quarters of the book. That's shallow, two-dimensional and childish. People are complex and so are their reactions to events big and small, and time changes you so much that the idea of your TRUE self being there, under layers of lies, waiting to be revealed by History or Nature through their Capital Letters scraping your personality as if you were a scratch card... I call BS on it, and old Fascist BS at that. The old Italian flavour of it, in American sauce. Popular, but stale.

And then the characters. Holy smoke.
On Wikipedia, under "bluntly plot-driven character development", there should be a picture of this novel's cover.
People in this story start as a bunch of insufferable Woke Wealthy Americans (the ones directly chosen as meal by the Sasquatch, I mean; the others have no depth, but they are just signposts for the Greek tragedy's chorus and, at the same time, function as explanatory labels under a painting, so who cares, right?). The narrator herself is a well-educated woman in her late twenties / early thirties who doesn't catch references such as Work Will Make You Free (seriously...), or such as a character calling herself by the "nom de plume" Mostar, knowing a lot of stuff, visibly first-hand, about sieges and wars, making sculptures full of fire and explosions, and KEEPING A BLOODY PICTURES OF HERSELF AND HER NOW NON-EXISTENT FAMILY IN FRONT OF A BLOODY EASTERN-EUROPEAN BRIDGE. I can't. I've never been to America, yet I have a feeling that this is too much EVEN for the most sheltered of them, if they made it through college. Right? No? Well, to make sure that the narrator's credibility truly collapses, our mr Brooks bestows upon her the gift of addiction to international news. But she knows NOTHING about Mostar and Auschwitz. You judge for yourselves.
The others are not better than her. I'll spare you the details. Then, at the sound of the referee's whistle, they all start twisting and turning in psychologically unnatural ways, to adapt to the author's thesis, the one I quickly summarised at the start of this review.
Another example of inconsistency: the narrator writes a journal for her therapist documenting minutiae through a natural disaster, the loss of contact with civilisation and a friggin' sasquatch attack. While writing about how they don't have time for sentimental values. While writing a journal. Wow.
I could go on longer, but I suspect you got my point. This guy is a plot Stalinist.
Miraculously, and to his credit, he manages to make some of those unbelievable characters come through as extremely likeable. Mostar, the Old Wise Motherly deus ex machina, is alive in front of me right now. She looks exactly like Red in Orange Is The New Black. She is tough but loving, she makes you want her to like you. Dan, the Resurrected Former Maladaptive Husband, becomes a real sweetheart after the epiphany. Sometimes he sounds a bit contrived in his newly found expertise in literally everything, but we already established that suspension of disbelief has to be pumped into this book by the gallon, so...

What can I say? I enjoyed the ride, but at traits it made me want to kill the driver. ( )

(4.25 Stars)

This was very enjoyable. Told in the same “found journal” style as World War Z, this is for anyone who likes speculative fiction mixed with documentaries. The repetition of thoughts reminded me of Palahniuk, and the flow is close to Weir.

The story is set in an off-the-grid community, with a backdrop of a major volcanic event… in the middle of an area where Sasquatch lived hidden from discovery. Until that volcano trapped them all together and broke the normal food sources. ( )

Well that was disappointing. I was really excited about the prospect of a Bigfoot horror/survival story, but "Devolution" didn't deliver. Half of this book is Brooks preaching about people's lack of survival skills, reliance on electronics, lack of natural disaster preparedness, and a whole host of other topics, and it's funny because I actually agree with him on many on these points, but the incessant harping about all these things got SO TEDIOUS. I probably sound like one of the people Brooks was narrating against, but it got to the moment where all I was thinking was, "Can we PLEASE just stop being serious and get back to the story?! " Yeah, he made some great points, but in doing so he sacrificed a lot of plot development.

The other half of the story is predictable and substitutes blood and gore in place of real terror. Sure, I had a chill here and there, but it was the same chill you get from watching a C-list horror movie knowing from the increasingly spooky music that some dude in a mask is about to jump out of a closet. Also, there was nothing new offered to the Bigfoot legend, or even anything that was new, period. It was, again, like a subpar movie, although now it's one of those survival ones where a wizened old scientist quips, "Humans took over Mother Nature...now Mother Nature is taking back what belongs to her!" I could have only read the first and last chapters of this book and then told you with 90% accuracy what happens, who dies, and what the climax of the book looks like. I went into this book prepared to enjoy every second of the Bigfoot-ness, but even as I was trying to force myself to like it I just couldn't: as the story went on it just devolved (lol) into a hot mess of predictable tropes and plot points, unlikeable characters, and dry dialogue.

There are other numerous little things I don't think were well done (the main character, Katie, is annoying as HELL; the Bigfoot for some reason speak a vaguely defined "American folk language" that SOMEHOW another character speaks, too; a bunch of really unnecessary footnotes) but I'm just leaving it here.

Can someone PLEASE write some good cryptid novels?! Cause this ain't it.

TL;DR "Devolution" is basically just the "Jurassic Park" movie but with Bigfoot. Spielberg=1, Brooks=0. ( )

Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre by Max Brooks is set in the deep Pacific Northwest forests near Mount Rainier in Washington State. The story is set in a small, isolated community developed specifically for technologically-dependent people. They are suddenly cut off from the rest of the world by a volcanic eruption. Then in addition to lacking outdoor survival skills and resources, they find themselves being attacked by a group of Bigfoot. While usually any writing about the legendary Sasquatch emphasizes that they are shy, solitary creatures, in this book they are like a tribe of chimpanzee, following a female leader and working together as a cohesive unit.

The story is dark and violent so words like “fun” and “enjoy” seem rather inappropriate but this stylish, dark, and captivating tale certainly pleased me. This isn’t a slow build up to excitement, the imaginative story quickly became disturbing and frightening. I live in the Pacific Northwest and do not for a moment believe in the Sasquatch but as a scary monster story, Devolution is very well done.

The author doesn’t bother with questions like “how did they get here?” or “where did they originate?” he simply jumps into this story of super-predators driven by hunger, stalking and hunting a group of lessor beings. As horror stories go, this one is a good one. ( )

I really like Max Brooks (I LOVED World War Z) and I was excited to read this because I am fascinated by Bigfoot stories so the concept of this book was perfect for me and I was excited to read it. I enjoyed the build up to the action...trying to figure out exactly what was happening and the idea of spending a winter cut off from society with relative strangers.

Where it lost me a little was in the actual confrontation with the Bigfoot troop. It would make a good action movie, I suppose, but I have trouble reading detailed fight scenes and while I totally understand why there was so much of this stuff in the book....it just wasn't exactly for me.

I read in the acknowledgements that this was originally planned as a movie...and I wish it stayed that way. ( )