Without spoilers, there’s a reason for this, which I found out at the end, and Brooks brings it home full force with a satisfying conclusion. The author then does something even bolder at the risk of losing the reader’s interest – no survivors were found, just the journal, so we go into the story without having even the hope of an ending where the people we read about are still alive. The book asks the reader to decide if the journal is part of a large-scale hoax or the most detailed account ever recorded of Bigfoot, an animal dismissed as the product of crackpot theories over the years. But we find out soon enough the reality that people can’t make nature adapt to them, they must adapt to it. Americans can’t live without the former before committing to the latter. The Green Revolution promises a modern solution that delivers both comfort and sustainability. I love how the story sets the stage with the indictment of society with its willful destruction of the planet so that people can simply maintain their lifestyles. The story is all muscle, no fat – the couple’s arrival to their new home off the beaten path, the introduction of this eco-community as a new sustainable American way of life, the volcano disaster, and then the slow horrifying realization that the wilderness is bigger and darker than they ever imagined. That’s right, Bigfoot is the boogeyman here, and what the creatures do to this small group of stranded homo sapiens is truly terrifying. Surviving the winter becomes secondary to surviving against beasts thought only to lurk in folklore and legend. Devolution centers on the recovered journal of one of the characters who lived through the horror of being trapped in the Washington state wilderness after Mount Rainier erupts and cuts off her small eco-community. The tale is structured similarly to World War Z which was told through eyewitness accounts of a global war. It’s about making a gut check and figuring out whether you will fold or fight when society itself crumbles. Like that tale, Devolution is about survival, not just the horrors that tear the world down. I had expectations for the novel, given how stunning World War Z turned out, a tale that cemented itself into the well-worn zombie genre with oodles of sophistication. Max Brooks is in top form with Devolution, his first major disaster thriller after the acclaimed World War Z.

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