This was a fun book. My only (completely unfair) complaint is that it’s not World War Z, But With Sasquatches Instead of Zombies. So this was something of a victim of Brooks’ success (like I said, it’s unfair), but still a good deal of fun.
Rather than the interview-format of WWZ (there are some, but they’re purely authorial asides), Devolution is the “recovered” diary recorded by a woman when her remote, isolated town was attacked by a … troop? Is troop the right term for a group of Sasquatches? (Come to that, is “Sasquatches” the plural of “Sasquatch,” or would the plural of “Sasquatch” just be “Sasquatch”? As both a proud grammar nerd and proud spec fic nerd, these questions are important to me) … we’ll go with troop of Sasquatches. Really, when you get down to it, Devolution is a book version of the “monster in the woods” subgenre of horror movie, of which Alien is probably the best known (yes, yes, I know it’s not set in the woods, but work with me here).
Where it suffers is, as I said, in comparison to World War Z. WWZ was relentlessly creative and eminently readable. Devolution is every bit as readable, but lacks the creativity of WWZ. WWZ told a story that was as literally global as you can get. Devolution takes place entirely in an isolated group of houses in Washington state - there’s literally 11 characters.
It also suffered a bit in that I found it so difficult to empathize with many of those 11. The isolated little group of houses is a kind of eco-commune near Mount Rainier, designed to be zero impact. Houses constructed of compressed bamboo, power coming from solar cells, heat coming from gas generated by septic waste, food deliveries coming once a week via the electric driverless delivery van … you get the idea. Naturally, the 11 people who live there are all the kind of stereotypical affluent champagne liberal that gets irrationally angry when their grocery order doesn’t include GMO free organic broccollini. In context it makes sense that that’s the cast, but it did make it harder to be upset when certain of them get eaten.
All in all, this was a very fun and easy-to-read book. Don’t go into it expecting World War Z and you’ll be a happy reader.
(one final aside: in reading this book, I ended up down a Wikipedia rabbit hole about volcanoes, and let me just say that lahars seem pretty freakin scary).
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