Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.Ī tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy. 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. While the story takes time to get going and certain aspects of the setting feel derivative, the characters, voice, and twists all demand readers’ attention.Ī compelling stand-alone debut that will leave readers thrilled, thoughtful, and anticipating the author’s next book.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. Johnson employs Cara’s situation to forthrightly examine questions of privilege, trauma, assimilation, colonialism, and upbringing. Even on Earth Zero, Cara lives an in-between life her black skin and Ashtown heritage mark her as an outsider in the domed confines of glittering and exclusive Wiley City and may make impossible her dreams of romance with her beautiful handler, Dell. When Cara visits an Earth very different from her home, she makes discoveries that could change multiple worlds. Cara, who hails from a bleak wasteland dominated by sinister emperor Nik Nik, has died on almost every known world. Because interworld travel is lethal to would-be traversers who have “dops” still alive on the Earth they’re visiting, Eldridge employs “trash people” who have died on most other worlds and can therefore survive travel to other realities. In a desolate post-apocalyptic future, narrator Cara is a “traverser” for the Eldridge Institute of Earth Zero, which has discovered 382 alternate worlds. Johnson’s world-hopping debut uses science fictional tools and an exciting plot to address urgent questions of privilege and position.
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