'It could be a survival of individuals, it could be survival of countries.' There’s probably a great horror novel about Sasquatch out there somewhere, but I won’t believe it till I see it.'It's all about survival,' author Max Brooks says of his work. We’re stuck in Kate’s limited perspective trudging through her flat prose. for far too many pages, Devolution plods along a dull middle ground, not so much building suspense as venting it. Given the monster stories set upon the world by Mary Shelley and other masters of the macabre, Brooks is trying to fill some awfully big shoes here. Cleverly, some of the elements of this story do seem reasonably plausible, which, as we’ve learned, is the key to any abominable conspiracy theory. With Devolution, Brooks brings his considerable investigative powers to a cryptozoological controversy that has been raging in the Pacific Northwest for decades. This marks a significant change for Brooks, who is a well-known expert on zombies, which are still widely disputed, like werewolves or climate change. As compelling as it is, you might find yourself wishing he’d opted to tell this story using a larger canvas. But there are times where the intimate scale of this novel feels at odds with some of Brooks’s larger thematic points. When Devolution shows a wider canvas-even a secret history of the world-it works brilliantly, and the scenes of two species each fighting for their life abound with harrowing moments. But Brooks’s ambitious take on human (and primate) nature sometimes balances unsteadily with the smaller details of life in Greenloop, including a few odd pop culture references. It’s telling that neither side-human or sasquatch-suggests cooperating to save both communities. We’re introduced to a disparate group with their own rivalries and shifting dynamics as anyone who’s seen a horror movie knows, we’re about to see most of these people meet terrible fates. The reader knows what’s coming, which means that the plot has more than a little horror movie in its DNA. gives the narrative the sort of doomed intensity of the best disaster movies. Devolution differs from World War Z in a few substantial ways as well, which ultimately make it a more intimate book than its predecessor-and a far stranger one.

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