Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice-for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. The many, many chapters leading up to it are full of slaughter, philosophical discussion, bureaucratic bumbling and spy-versus-spy stuff (Gordon Liddy with fangs and Mossad meets Mephistopheles with German accents)-all of it improbable in the extreme, but in very good fun.Ī satisfying story that delivers everything it promises.Īre we not men? We are-well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).Ī zombie apocalypse is one thing. Can good prevail? Given a trio of very naughty baddies, that’s a question that remains in play until the very end. speed limit”) while never losing sight of the task at hand, which is to set spectacular villains in motion and watch them visit mayhem on the planet while the good guys figure out what comes next. (The novel is also reminiscent at turns of Stephen King, X-Men and Gone with the Wind.) The tale unfolds in the early years of the Reagan administration, and Simmons is note-perfect on period details (“no one obeyed the 55 m.p.h. The Big Idea involves-well, World War II, and the hidden forces that control history, and man’s being a wolf to other men, and mind control, and other good things, with key moments set against the backdrop of Charleston, S.C., which is of course a splendidly creepy place, almost as creepy as Anne Rice’s New Orleans. Here, as usual, the foreplay to sex is most often in the form of mind control, the sex itself a matter of quantification and qualification (“her breasts were full, perhaps too full for her height, and they pressed nicely against her gold and blue blazer”), and the cuddling afterward a prelude to nasty surprises. Horrormeister Simmons ( Drood, 2009, etc.) has been dishing up dollops of gruesome spectacle for decades now, and he’s hit on a winning formula: Give vampires and other children of the night lots to do over lots of pages, set up a Big Idea as backdrop to the proceedings and season with lashings of sex, violence and current events. Does evil exist? You betcha-and you will obey it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |