Today, I’m delighted to be able to show off the stonking cover for my next historical novel, BATTLE LORD, which is out in January, and which as those interested may have guessed, is a direct sequel to USURPER, published last April. You’ll find that a few paragraphs down, where I’ll also give a brief intro to BATTLE LORD.
In addition this week, because I’m reminded with each passing day by the slowly turning weather and leaves, that we’re now into the last quadrant of the year, I’ll be giving another plug to my autumn novella, SEASON OF MIST (hopefully in an imaginative way, which will be more than just a straightforward advert), and in addition to all that, in the Thrillers, Chillers section, which you’ll find at the lower end of today’s post, will be reviewing and discussing Max Brooks’s terrifying tale of the Pacific Northwest, DEVOLUTION.
So, lots to get through today. But before anything else, as promised, here’s the jacket art for my next historical novel, BATTLE LORD, the sequel to USURPER, which will be published on January 8. I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s pretty damn eye-catching.
His family’s home in Swaledale, in Northumbria, and their central fortification, Wulfbury, were captured by a splinter-group from the Viking army of Harald ‘the Hardraada’ Sigurdsson, a Norse leader of great renown. However, though the Hardraada was slain shortly afterwards at the battle of Stamford Bridge, those who captured Wulfbury still hang onto it, bent on making it the centre of their own Northern English powerbase.
Cerdic is already formulating a plan for their destruction, but first he must somehow get past this latest horde of invaders, the near-invincible army of William the Conqueror.
And now, on a somewhat different note, let’s dive into some …
Autumn chills
People who read a lot of my work may be aware that one of the pieces I’m most proud of is the novella, SEASON OF MIST, which was first published in the collection, WALKERS IN THE DARK, in 2010, (now long out of print) but was re-released as a stand-alone publication by Brentwood Press in 2019.
A horror/thriller set in 1974, it is partly autobiographical, and it follows the fortunes of a small group of school-age children in an industrial Lancashire town, who are increasingly convinced that the serial killer currently targeting the town’s young is an evil spirit resurrected from a nearby derelict coal mine, known simply as Red Clogs. (It is NOT, by the way, a story for child or YA readers).
However, what I’m not going to do is repeat myself by waxing lyrical about winter being ‘the dead time’, when even the land itself appears to be in the grip of malignancy (so obviously there must be ghosts and goblins about!), or ‘the dark time’, a tradition going back millennia, when, with the harvest collected and no real work to do until early spring, all there was left was to sit around the long-hall fire, drinking mead and regaling each other with tall tales.
Primarily, this is because I’m not talking about the winter, I’m talking about the autumn.
Now, okay, let’s not split hairs. Autumn is the gateway to winter. We all know that. But it’s in the autumn when the nights start lengthening, the vegetation withers, the mist rises and all of a sudden even a walk in the woods seems a lot creepier than it did a couple of weeks earlier.
Autumn has a flavour all of its own.
So, bearing SEASON OF MIST in mind, I thought I’d take a look at this time of year – to be specific, the months of September, October and November – from my own perspective, and try to work out what it is about that period that so inspires authors of dark and fantastical fiction.
But I’m not here today to talk about that. As I say, I’m looking at a time when we were NOT force-fed ghostly stuff at this time of year, to try and establish exactly what it was about the SEASON OF MIST (see what I did there: plug, plug … sorry, I’m as bad as the rest of them) that made it the natural home of the spook story. So, backwards we go now, to those long ago ...
Well … I may refer to my childhood experience of the autumn in such terms, but the truth is that it wasn’t always happy. Not in early September.
Just think about it.
All those sun-soaked summer days of limitless pleasure, dressed only in shorts and t-shirts, riding your bikes along leafy woodland paths, going with your mates on the train to Blackpool or Southport, playing cricket or footy all day in the park, two piles of your packed lunches providing the goal posts. Only coming home after ten o’clock, because it was that late when the sun finally went down, but getting up again at the crack of dawn, because it was already broad daylight, and doing the whole thing again … and all without a worry in the world. But then, almost overnight, (and it was overnight, because one day it was August, and then suddenly it was September), you were going back to the world of school and homework, the weather worsening around your ears, the long dark nights drawing in, the green and pleasant land of your long, rambling summer holiday slowly and systematically obliterated.
That said, kids being kids, we didn’t let it get us down for long. Once the autumn got going, you automatically became aware that it had its own delicacies.
Looking back on it, there were some curious traditions. I remember that, during the early 1970s, it was always in or around September when we started to play marbles and trump cards. The obvious explanation is with the weather deteriorating, we kids were forced to find indoor distractions. Meanwhile, the other big autumn sport when I was young was conkers, which apart from the bit where you got rollocked by adults for battering the neighbourhood’s horse-chestnut trees with sticks and stones, was the best fun ever.
(I understand that kids are not allowed to play conkers anymore; I’m sure there’s a valid reason for this in the eyes of some, but frankly, the mind boggles. How can you have the autumn and not have conkers?)
Ultimately of course, conkers and marbles had nothing whatsoever to do with the spooky side of the autumn (I merely mention them to provide some period colour). Much more relevant to this post were the special events of the season, but not perhaps in the order some might expect.
For instance, during my childhood, the main festival at this time of year was not Halloween, but November 5, Bonfire Night.
Don’t get me wrong. We were aware of Halloween, and we did celebrate it, but Halloween parties in our day tended to be organised by kids themselves, with minimal adult involvement and almost no money spent, costumes usually homemade or improvised, and tin cans with faces cut into them standing in for pumpkins and turnips.
Happy days
Well … I may refer to my childhood experience of the autumn in such terms, but the truth is that it wasn’t always happy. Not in early September.
Just think about it.
All those sun-soaked summer days of limitless pleasure, dressed only in shorts and t-shirts, riding your bikes along leafy woodland paths, going with your mates on the train to Blackpool or Southport, playing cricket or footy all day in the park, two piles of your packed lunches providing the goal posts. Only coming home after ten o’clock, because it was that late when the sun finally went down, but getting up again at the crack of dawn, because it was already broad daylight, and doing the whole thing again … and all without a worry in the world. But then, almost overnight, (and it was overnight, because one day it was August, and then suddenly it was September), you were going back to the world of school and homework, the weather worsening around your ears, the long dark nights drawing in, the green and pleasant land of your long, rambling summer holiday slowly and systematically obliterated.
That said, kids being kids, we didn’t let it get us down for long. Once the autumn got going, you automatically became aware that it had its own delicacies.
Looking back on it, there were some curious traditions. I remember that, during the early 1970s, it was always in or around September when we started to play marbles and trump cards. The obvious explanation is with the weather deteriorating, we kids were forced to find indoor distractions. Meanwhile, the other big autumn sport when I was young was conkers, which apart from the bit where you got rollocked by adults for battering the neighbourhood’s horse-chestnut trees with sticks and stones, was the best fun ever.
(I understand that kids are not allowed to play conkers anymore; I’m sure there’s a valid reason for this in the eyes of some, but frankly, the mind boggles. How can you have the autumn and not have conkers?)
Ultimately of course, conkers and marbles had nothing whatsoever to do with the spooky side of the autumn (I merely mention them to provide some period colour). Much more relevant to this post were the special events of the season, but not perhaps in the order some might expect.
For instance, during my childhood, the main festival at this time of year was not Halloween, but November 5, Bonfire Night.
Don’t get me wrong. We were aware of Halloween, and we did celebrate it, but Halloween parties in our day tended to be organised by kids themselves, with minimal adult involvement and almost no money spent, costumes usually homemade or improvised, and tin cans with faces cut into them standing in for pumpkins and turnips.
That was the occasion when all the stops got pulled out, when you’d intone rhyming couplets about it at school – Remember, remember, etc – when your mum would get the black peas and the treacle toffee ready, when the gruesome safety adverts would fill you with genuine horror, and on the big night itself, when the sky would glitter with pyrotechnics, and everyone’s back yard was alight with blazing piles of timber, the air thick with gunpowder smoke and echoing to whistles and shrieks …
There were so many signs in autumn that all this excitement was approaching, even as early as September.
Fireworks started appearing in every corner-shop window. You could buy them individually in those days, not just in Government-approved boxes, and chucking bangers at each other was a very popular pastime, though much frowned-upon by parents and the authorities. Pyramid-shaped bonfires, or ‘bommies’, would sprout on every scrap of wasteland, each usually with its own quota of rubber tyres on top, and would be zealously defended by those who’d built them.
There were so many signs in autumn that all this excitement was approaching, even as early as September.
Fireworks started appearing in every corner-shop window. You could buy them individually in those days, not just in Government-approved boxes, and chucking bangers at each other was a very popular pastime, though much frowned-upon by parents and the authorities. Pyramid-shaped bonfires, or ‘bommies’, would sprout on every scrap of wasteland, each usually with its own quota of rubber tyres on top, and would be zealously defended by those who’d built them.
But most relevant of all to today’s post, the penny-for-the-guy gangs materialised. Bunches of eager youngsters who’d shove their Guy Fawkes effigies from door to door in wheelbarrows, asking for money, or would wait in prominent places in town centres or on the corners of housing estates.
The Guys were very strange objects: straw or newspaper-stuffed mannequins, often wearing garish masks to cover the blankness of their real faces. There was invariably an air of the grotesque about these limp and ragged replicas of humanity, not least because you knew they represented an arch-traitor who had died a barbarous death, and because they themselves would shortly be consumed by flames, to the encouraging roars of a joyful crowd.
Did this feed into the eerie side of the season?
I personally think it did. I’ve already mentioned that we marked Halloween as well. The two celebrations were only a week apart, so often your Halloween stuff was stored in the same shed as your bonfire stuff. Lifeless dummies, ugly masks and dark, dingy clothing briefly became part and parcel of the season.
But don’t assume the rough-and-ready nature of these preparations spoiled anything. For example, the cheapness of the British Halloween in that era was often compensated for by the lack of adult supervision, which meant you could get away with an awful lot. Trick or treating could sometimes get out of hand, though the main advantage of having no mums or dads around was that you could up the stakes when it came to scaring the bejeezus out of each other.
The first time I ever heard the synopsis of The Exorcist was during one of our Halloween Night ghost story sessions – bear in mind that I was about 10 at the time – and as we were all sitting around in the darkness of some dilapidated garage on the edge of derelict industrial land, it scared me half to death. Equally, we improvised a range of terrifying games: Scream Inn, Slaughter in the Dark, Werewolf By Night, which were all designed to take advantage of the opaque blackness and drifting mist on evenings in the lonesome October.
That brings me to the other key factor: the way the environment subtly changed during the autumn.
The verdant landscapes of summer (even in Wigan we had some of those) slowly morphing into something distinctly more sinister, the sun-dappled greenery becoming hanging mats of decay, tides of fallen leaves obscuring the paths and footways, scabrous, fungus-riddled tree-trunks emerging from the lank, brown foliage. Even the air smelled different. It was colder, damper. Get out into the woods and wasteland, and there was a constant reek of mildew.
It was the perfect setting for horror stories and horror games. My particular group of friends, who, frankly, were significantly braver (or more reckless) than many others of our age, would venture far from the streetlights, probing into the shadow-filled ruins of collieries and factories, or along redundant railway lines where you literally couldn’t see your hand in front of your face, all the while telling each other more terrifying tales – about escaped lunatics and mass murderers, about the ghosts of long-dead, horribly mutilated pitmen still wandering the coal tips (yes, Red Clogs was a genuine legend of that time and place, a vengeful spectre who allegedly haunted every Lancashire colliery from Giant’s Hall, near where I lived, to Sutton Manor in St Helens), or about Nanny Green Teeth, who swam the flashes and canals looking to drown unwary youngsters, and even the Pendle Witches, whose evil souls still rode the high winds, screeching with angry glee.
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But even if we hadn’t been of that inclination, the uncanny transformation of the land would have worked its spell on us, would have made us think dark thoughts whether we liked it or not.
Here’s a brief but hopefully appropriate snippet from SEASON OF MIST:
In 1974, it was Dom’s suggestion that we hold the Halloween party in the garage at his house. That seemed like a good idea to me. It was separate from the main house, at the end of a secondary drive, and surrounded by thick evergreen shrubbery. It didn’t have any power connected to it, and even its wooden door, which was covered in flaking blue paint, had to be lifted manually to enable you to get inside. It also meant that we’d have to spend at least a few days around Dom’s house, sorting things out, and that might bring me back into the orbit of his sister, who I hadn’t seen for the best part of a month.
I know it sounds ridiculous: on one hand excitedly planning a childish party, and on the other lusting for the attention of a shapely, dark-haired nineteen-year-old. But these juxtaposed emotions were real. I was on the cusp of manhood and didn’t realise it. We’d no idea that within a year we’d no longer be having Halloween parties in darkened garages, would have minimal interest in fireworks, and would view Christmas mainly as an opportunity to steal kisses from girls in class and sneak bottles of cider from our parents’ festive stock. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why 1974 was one of the greatest and yet at the same time most terrible years of my life. I lived every moment of it with huge intensity, as though unconsciously aware that it was my childhood’s last fling. Even now, so many years later, I remember every sight and sound of that last autumn of innocence, every star-spangled night, every mist-wreathed woodland, every twisted shape watching coldly from the shadows …
That was the autumn of my childhood, which extended from the late-1960s to the late-1970s, and it may go some way to explaining why even now, at the age of 59, I still consider these later months of the year to be so satisfyingly scary. Even without the preponderance of Halloweenorama that now gets rammed down our throats on TV and online, they would have that same effect.
And I suspect I’m not the only one. Here, for your delectation, is a quick, off-the-top-of-my-head list of some of the best ghost and horror stories in which the autumn is a key player (all predating the huge Halloween retail operation that we see today). Check out:
The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
The Beckoning Fair One – Oliver Onions
Something Wicked This Way Comes – Ray Bradbury
The Guy – Ramsey Campbell
Eyes – Charles L Grant
The Black Pumpkin – Dean Koontz
Dark Harvest – Norman Partridge
And so on and so forth. Even after a quick experimental mind-scan, there are far too many to name, which is vindication of a sort, I suppose.
THRILLERS, CHILLERS, SHOCKERS AND KILLERS …
An ongoing series of reviews of dark fiction (crime, thriller, horror and sci-fi) – both old and new – that I have recently read and enjoyed. I’ll endeavour to keep the SPOILERS to a minimum; there will certainly be no given-away denouements or exposed twists-in-the-tail, but by the definition of the word ‘review’, I’m going to be talking about these books in more than just thumbnail detail, extolling the aspects that I particularly enjoyed (I’ll outline the plot first, and follow it with my opinions) … so I guess if you’d rather not know anything at all about these pieces of work in advance of reading them yourself, then these particular posts will not be your thing.
DEVOLUTION
Did this feed into the eerie side of the season?
I personally think it did. I’ve already mentioned that we marked Halloween as well. The two celebrations were only a week apart, so often your Halloween stuff was stored in the same shed as your bonfire stuff. Lifeless dummies, ugly masks and dark, dingy clothing briefly became part and parcel of the season.
But don’t assume the rough-and-ready nature of these preparations spoiled anything. For example, the cheapness of the British Halloween in that era was often compensated for by the lack of adult supervision, which meant you could get away with an awful lot. Trick or treating could sometimes get out of hand, though the main advantage of having no mums or dads around was that you could up the stakes when it came to scaring the bejeezus out of each other.
The first time I ever heard the synopsis of The Exorcist was during one of our Halloween Night ghost story sessions – bear in mind that I was about 10 at the time – and as we were all sitting around in the darkness of some dilapidated garage on the edge of derelict industrial land, it scared me half to death. Equally, we improvised a range of terrifying games: Scream Inn, Slaughter in the Dark, Werewolf By Night, which were all designed to take advantage of the opaque blackness and drifting mist on evenings in the lonesome October.
It was the perfect setting for horror stories and horror games. My particular group of friends, who, frankly, were significantly braver (or more reckless) than many others of our age, would venture far from the streetlights, probing into the shadow-filled ruins of collieries and factories, or along redundant railway lines where you literally couldn’t see your hand in front of your face, all the while telling each other more terrifying tales – about escaped lunatics and mass murderers, about the ghosts of long-dead, horribly mutilated pitmen still wandering the coal tips (yes, Red Clogs was a genuine legend of that time and place, a vengeful spectre who allegedly haunted every Lancashire colliery from Giant’s Hall, near where I lived, to Sutton Manor in St Helens), or about Nanny Green Teeth, who swam the flashes and canals looking to drown unwary youngsters, and even the Pendle Witches, whose evil souls still rode the high winds, screeching with angry glee.
.jpg)
Here’s a brief but hopefully appropriate snippet from SEASON OF MIST:
In 1974, it was Dom’s suggestion that we hold the Halloween party in the garage at his house. That seemed like a good idea to me. It was separate from the main house, at the end of a secondary drive, and surrounded by thick evergreen shrubbery. It didn’t have any power connected to it, and even its wooden door, which was covered in flaking blue paint, had to be lifted manually to enable you to get inside. It also meant that we’d have to spend at least a few days around Dom’s house, sorting things out, and that might bring me back into the orbit of his sister, who I hadn’t seen for the best part of a month.
I know it sounds ridiculous: on one hand excitedly planning a childish party, and on the other lusting for the attention of a shapely, dark-haired nineteen-year-old. But these juxtaposed emotions were real. I was on the cusp of manhood and didn’t realise it. We’d no idea that within a year we’d no longer be having Halloween parties in darkened garages, would have minimal interest in fireworks, and would view Christmas mainly as an opportunity to steal kisses from girls in class and sneak bottles of cider from our parents’ festive stock. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why 1974 was one of the greatest and yet at the same time most terrible years of my life. I lived every moment of it with huge intensity, as though unconsciously aware that it was my childhood’s last fling. Even now, so many years later, I remember every sight and sound of that last autumn of innocence, every star-spangled night, every mist-wreathed woodland, every twisted shape watching coldly from the shadows …
That was the autumn of my childhood, which extended from the late-1960s to the late-1970s, and it may go some way to explaining why even now, at the age of 59, I still consider these later months of the year to be so satisfyingly scary. Even without the preponderance of Halloweenorama that now gets rammed down our throats on TV and online, they would have that same effect.
And I suspect I’m not the only one. Here, for your delectation, is a quick, off-the-top-of-my-head list of some of the best ghost and horror stories in which the autumn is a key player (all predating the huge Halloween retail operation that we see today). Check out:
The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
The Beckoning Fair One – Oliver Onions
Something Wicked This Way Comes – Ray Bradbury
The Guy – Ramsey Campbell
Eyes – Charles L Grant
The Black Pumpkin – Dean Koontz
Dark Harvest – Norman Partridge
And so on and so forth. Even after a quick experimental mind-scan, there are far too many to name, which is vindication of a sort, I suppose.
THRILLERS, CHILLERS, SHOCKERS AND KILLERS …
An ongoing series of reviews of dark fiction (crime, thriller, horror and sci-fi) – both old and new – that I have recently read and enjoyed. I’ll endeavour to keep the SPOILERS to a minimum; there will certainly be no given-away denouements or exposed twists-in-the-tail, but by the definition of the word ‘review’, I’m going to be talking about these books in more than just thumbnail detail, extolling the aspects that I particularly enjoyed (I’ll outline the plot first, and follow it with my opinions) … so I guess if you’d rather not know anything at all about these pieces of work in advance of reading them yourself, then these particular posts will not be your thing.
DEVOLUTION
by Max Brooks (2020)
Outline
Thirteen months have passed since Mount Rainier, an active volcano in the Cascade Mountains, in America’s Pacific Northwest, erupted with devastating consequences. Among the many casualties recorded at the time was the majority of the population of Greenloop, a small town in a remote corner of Mount Rainier National Park, which was completely destroyed during the disaster. All of its occupants’ bodies were recovered later, with the exception of one, a certain Kate Holland, who has never been seen since.
When a local reporter is contacted by Kate’s brother, one Frank McCray, who tells him that the population of Greenloop didn’t die in a mudslide or from poisonous volcanic fumes, or anything of that sort, but in fact were murdered by a Bigfoot clan, having itself been displaced by the eruption, the newshound undertakes to investigate, first of all by studying Kate’s journal, but also by holding in-depth interviews with McCray himself and National Park ranger, Josephine Schell.
The narrative that follows has been cobbled together from these various sources, in addition to items drawn from earlier works of Bigfoot research, and it tells a terrifying tale …
When Kate Holland and her husband, Dan, first arrive in Greenloop, they find it a place of many inconsistencies. The creation of wealthy techno-czar, Tony Durrant, it is on one hand a site of communal living, a purpose-built, eco-conscious hamlet far out in the wilderness, allowing its residents to give up safely on urban living and get back in synch with the natural world (for example, its dwellings are environmentally-friendly cabins, its backup power resources courtesy of solar panelling and biogas generators), but at the same time it is entirely dependent on modern tech, everything here automated and controlled by apps on its occupants’ laptops, phones or iPads, while essential supplies are air-lifted in by drones and wi-fi delivered by fibre-optic cable. If that isn’t enough, Seattle, which is only 90 miles away, is easily reachable by the nearest highway.
On top of all that, Greenloop is an expensive place to live, only really available to moneyed academics who can afford to give up on the rest of the world. It doesn’t go uncommented on that folk like these, who’ve rarely, if ever, got their hands dirty doing real outdoors work, are likely to be among the least able to survive off the grid in the event of some kind of disaster. They don’t possess anything as useful as an actual tool, never mind a weapon, and they certainly lack the muscle-memory to use one.
In truth, it’s a pretence at ‘going green’ rather than the real thing, an elaborate form of virtue signalling, minus any actual hardship, but it would be untrue to say that life in Greenloop is not, in its unique way, quite attractive.
Kate Holland herself is very much a creature of the modern world, a hyper-stressed executive type, who is here to try and decompress, and with the aid of a journal, which her therapist insists she keeps in detail and regularly updates, is seeking to reorganise her entire approach to life.
She’d particularly like to fix her relationship with husband, Dan, though this feels as if it will be quite a challenge.
It’s through Kate’s journal that we follow her initial interactions with other Greenloop residents, all of whom are, in their different ways, well-heeled oddballs, none seeming to possess even the most basic life skills, with the exception of the acerbic artist Mostar, who, it gradually becomes obvious, has led a far more lived-in life than any of the others, including Kate and Dan.
Few of the residents really get on, but for the sake of peace, efforts to be civil to each other are mostly successful. However, when Mount Rainier erupts, it is a real and serious problem. The community, though undamaged by the fall-out from the volcano, find themselves completely cut off from the rest of the country. What’s worse, the Washington State infrastructure has been hugely disrupted, while wholesale civil disorder has broken out in Seattle, the sum total of which is that rescuers won’t be coming along any time soon.
Tony, the de facto leader of the community, even though he’s somewhat uninspiring in that role, suggests that they only need to sit tight and help will arrive at some point. Mostar, who we later learn was in the Balkans during the war of the 1990s, makes practical suggestions, not just about rationing food, but in terms of educating themselves in matters of basic maintenance. At first, the townsfolk respond constructively to the crisis, but gradually, as their isolation continues, the supplies diminish and conditions get harder, and people who, despite initial brief comradeship, really don’t like each other, soon start to display it.
To make matters worse, Kate increasingly suspects that some kind of hostile animal lurking in the woods nearby is taking ever greater interest in them. More and more evidence of this emerges, and when she is one day chased back into the compound by a huge apelike creature, she is drawn to the conclusion not just that Bigfoot is real, but that he’s here, finally driven out of hiding by the eruption.
Of course, no one believes her at first. Most likely she encountered a bear. Typical townie. How would she know the difference? But the beasts now encircling Greenloop are getting steadily bolder, and when the townsfolk start hearing blood-chilling, ape-like shrieks in the woods, and find their bins and compost containers ripped open, they realise that it isn’t just one enormous hominid they are facing here, but several. Eco-conscious retiree, Vincent Boothe, attempts to make contact, but is rewarded by a shower of heavy stones, which do massive damage and clearly illustrate that their as yet (mostly) unseen opponents are very antagonistic.
Still feeling that this is all some massive misunderstanding between species, Vincent volunteers to go out of town on foot and literally hike his way to civilisation. Mostar advises against this, but he won’t listen … and that night they are all wakened by his screams of agony. Despite Mostar’s warning that it’s a trap, Kate and Dan also risk venturing out.
All they find left of him is scattered meat and bone. Whatever the giant apes dined on previously has evidently now been denied to them by Mount Rainier. So, they’ve found something else to eat. The community thus defers to Mostar, who prepares it for war …
Review
Anyone who knows their great apes knows they are not to be trifled with. Once you are out there in the wild, our closest relatives on the evolutionary scale can be our most dangerous enemies. Intelligent, ferocious, incredibly strong and aggressively tribal, the ape and monkey species of the world can pose a very serious threat to any human who, intentionally or otherwise, wanders into their domain. This is a fact of life as we know it. But now imagine that they each stand to about eight or nine feet tall and weigh in at about 490lbs, and that you are deep in their territory but can’t get away because Nature has conspired against it.
This is the premise of Devolution, Max Brooks’ latest epistolatory horror-adventure. And it’s a genuinely terrifying one, even more so as the human enclave soon being encroached on by the sasquatch clan is weaker than you might normally find. This is the land of gun ownership, but they don’t have any guns. This is the land of the outdoorsman, but there are no outdoorsmen here. Greenloop is all about sustainable living, but it can’t sustain itself even for a week when its power has been cut.
As I worked my way through the first half of the book – which is a real ‘slow burn’, I have to say – all these facts were gnawing on me. It struck me from the outset that this deluded techno-hipster community was vastly more vulnerable than even its most enlightened member realised. That it was, in fact, ripe for the plucking. Of course, it only makes things worse that, even though the residents of Greenloop don’t know about it, we readers are well aware – because we’ve been told in advance – of the savage forces gathering in the encircling forest.
I found that idea alone intensely frightening. And it doesn’t get any easier the more the Greenloop residents realise what they are up against, because there is nothing they can do about it anyway. Nothing obvious, at least. When the battle commences, it’s every bit as violently one-sided as you would expect, though the humans increasingly show ingenuity and aggression of their own, slowly but surely evening the score.
And it’s this that makes Devolution more than just another scary creature-feature.
As with Brooks’ thumping first success, World War Z, the author, while he’s undoubtedly keen to tell a rattling good terror tale, is also interested here in how humanity would respond to such an assault (in effect, how quickly and effectively they could and would go to war). In the first book it was the world-scale response. In this one, it’s the world in miniature.
The Greenloop community comprises a diverse assortment of interesting characters, all with their own strengths and flaws. Some reviewers have accused Brooks of wasting time with this.
‘We know they’re all going to die anyway, so why bother building them up?’
But for me that’s missing the point. First of all, Brooks, as all good fiction writers should, is ensuring that these characters in peril are characters we care about. If they’re just blank sheets it won’t matter if they get torn apart. Secondly, and this I think is his real aim, he’s putting us – mankind – in the frame. It takes all sorts to make a human community, with the usual exception of deadly fighters and square-jawed heroes. Because let’s be honest, in how many communities in the world do those people actually exist? One response to Devolution has been to sneer at how ineffectual this bunch of latter-day middle-class hippies actually are, to laugh at how easily they are picked off by monstrous brutes with far lower intellects, to say smugly that this is the outcome of easy living and over-reliance on technology. But how many of the rest of us don’t fall into that same category? How many of the rest of us wouldn’t make it out of the wild woods alive if we were abandoned there, with or without the presence of giant, man-eating apes?
However, this isn’t a situation that will remain unchanged.
It’s a near certainty that humans, when they are under attack, will eventually counterattack. We are a notoriously belligerent race in our own right. We mastered the beasts when we had very little to fight them with save sticks and stones. So, in Devolution, the hominids don’t have it all their own way.
By this, I don’t mean to say that Max Brooks goes all The Hills Have Eyes on us. It’s not the case here that those who are seemingly innocent at the start of it eventually are so abused that they become abusers themselves. That said, they demonstrate a significant degree of devolution. Particularly Kate Holland, whose disappearance at the end of the narrative may not be down to the predators having dragged her off into the trees.
The big question is does it all work?
Well, for me the answer is a resounding yes, for various reasons.
Not all reviewers have appreciated the epistolary style, which, as I’ve already mentioned, was also used in World War Z, but for me it adds a classic horror vibe. The presence of Bigfoot in the North American backwoods is still a matter of debate. Is he there, or isn’t he? It’s an age-old mystery with its roots in Native American lore, a definitive answer still elusive thanks to the sparsity of hard evidence. And this novel simply adds to that.
Is Kate Holland’s journal for real? Did these things genuinely happen, or was she driven crazy by horror and despair at the deaths of her friends during a volcanic catastrophe? No certain answer is possible, so ultimately, along with all those bits of grainy film and curious late-night audio recordings we can these days check out on YouTube, it can never be anything more than yet another fragment of a clue, the authenticity of which can only be guessed at.
This also puts it in the category of ‘found footage’ horror, or perhaps ‘found text’, though that in itself is nothing new; it harks back to the classic days of Bram Stoker, HP Lovecraft and Weird Tales. However, it also serves a functional purpose. Though I strongly doubt that anyone could recollect conversations of days earlier so perfectly word-for-word that you could reproduce them in a diary and they’d read as smoothly as they do here, which is perhaps one overarching weakness of Devolution, I’m prepared to give leeway because I can’t help thinking that telling this story as a straight narrative, particularly as so much of the first half of it concerns Greenloop world-building, I can’t help thinking it would drag too much in the build-up.
All round, Devolution is a superior horror novel, a good old-fashioned monster story, with a strong Man v Nature subtext, which is particularly pertinent in this age, when we all unquestioningly support green issues, and yet should perhaps be cautious that we don’t get exactly what we wish for. It’s a wild world out there; we’ve conquered a lot of it, but it wouldn’t take much for it to conquer us back.
For once, I’m not going to bother with my homegrown casting choices for a movie version of Devolution, as Legendary Entertainment optioned it on publication, and, according to the Hollywood Reporter last year, had appointed James Ashcroft to direct (mockumentary style, by all accounts), and that trailers may hit the internet before the end of this year.
Outline
Thirteen months have passed since Mount Rainier, an active volcano in the Cascade Mountains, in America’s Pacific Northwest, erupted with devastating consequences. Among the many casualties recorded at the time was the majority of the population of Greenloop, a small town in a remote corner of Mount Rainier National Park, which was completely destroyed during the disaster. All of its occupants’ bodies were recovered later, with the exception of one, a certain Kate Holland, who has never been seen since.
When a local reporter is contacted by Kate’s brother, one Frank McCray, who tells him that the population of Greenloop didn’t die in a mudslide or from poisonous volcanic fumes, or anything of that sort, but in fact were murdered by a Bigfoot clan, having itself been displaced by the eruption, the newshound undertakes to investigate, first of all by studying Kate’s journal, but also by holding in-depth interviews with McCray himself and National Park ranger, Josephine Schell.
The narrative that follows has been cobbled together from these various sources, in addition to items drawn from earlier works of Bigfoot research, and it tells a terrifying tale …
When Kate Holland and her husband, Dan, first arrive in Greenloop, they find it a place of many inconsistencies. The creation of wealthy techno-czar, Tony Durrant, it is on one hand a site of communal living, a purpose-built, eco-conscious hamlet far out in the wilderness, allowing its residents to give up safely on urban living and get back in synch with the natural world (for example, its dwellings are environmentally-friendly cabins, its backup power resources courtesy of solar panelling and biogas generators), but at the same time it is entirely dependent on modern tech, everything here automated and controlled by apps on its occupants’ laptops, phones or iPads, while essential supplies are air-lifted in by drones and wi-fi delivered by fibre-optic cable. If that isn’t enough, Seattle, which is only 90 miles away, is easily reachable by the nearest highway.
On top of all that, Greenloop is an expensive place to live, only really available to moneyed academics who can afford to give up on the rest of the world. It doesn’t go uncommented on that folk like these, who’ve rarely, if ever, got their hands dirty doing real outdoors work, are likely to be among the least able to survive off the grid in the event of some kind of disaster. They don’t possess anything as useful as an actual tool, never mind a weapon, and they certainly lack the muscle-memory to use one.
In truth, it’s a pretence at ‘going green’ rather than the real thing, an elaborate form of virtue signalling, minus any actual hardship, but it would be untrue to say that life in Greenloop is not, in its unique way, quite attractive.
Kate Holland herself is very much a creature of the modern world, a hyper-stressed executive type, who is here to try and decompress, and with the aid of a journal, which her therapist insists she keeps in detail and regularly updates, is seeking to reorganise her entire approach to life.
She’d particularly like to fix her relationship with husband, Dan, though this feels as if it will be quite a challenge.
It’s through Kate’s journal that we follow her initial interactions with other Greenloop residents, all of whom are, in their different ways, well-heeled oddballs, none seeming to possess even the most basic life skills, with the exception of the acerbic artist Mostar, who, it gradually becomes obvious, has led a far more lived-in life than any of the others, including Kate and Dan.
Few of the residents really get on, but for the sake of peace, efforts to be civil to each other are mostly successful. However, when Mount Rainier erupts, it is a real and serious problem. The community, though undamaged by the fall-out from the volcano, find themselves completely cut off from the rest of the country. What’s worse, the Washington State infrastructure has been hugely disrupted, while wholesale civil disorder has broken out in Seattle, the sum total of which is that rescuers won’t be coming along any time soon.
Tony, the de facto leader of the community, even though he’s somewhat uninspiring in that role, suggests that they only need to sit tight and help will arrive at some point. Mostar, who we later learn was in the Balkans during the war of the 1990s, makes practical suggestions, not just about rationing food, but in terms of educating themselves in matters of basic maintenance. At first, the townsfolk respond constructively to the crisis, but gradually, as their isolation continues, the supplies diminish and conditions get harder, and people who, despite initial brief comradeship, really don’t like each other, soon start to display it.
To make matters worse, Kate increasingly suspects that some kind of hostile animal lurking in the woods nearby is taking ever greater interest in them. More and more evidence of this emerges, and when she is one day chased back into the compound by a huge apelike creature, she is drawn to the conclusion not just that Bigfoot is real, but that he’s here, finally driven out of hiding by the eruption.
Of course, no one believes her at first. Most likely she encountered a bear. Typical townie. How would she know the difference? But the beasts now encircling Greenloop are getting steadily bolder, and when the townsfolk start hearing blood-chilling, ape-like shrieks in the woods, and find their bins and compost containers ripped open, they realise that it isn’t just one enormous hominid they are facing here, but several. Eco-conscious retiree, Vincent Boothe, attempts to make contact, but is rewarded by a shower of heavy stones, which do massive damage and clearly illustrate that their as yet (mostly) unseen opponents are very antagonistic.
Still feeling that this is all some massive misunderstanding between species, Vincent volunteers to go out of town on foot and literally hike his way to civilisation. Mostar advises against this, but he won’t listen … and that night they are all wakened by his screams of agony. Despite Mostar’s warning that it’s a trap, Kate and Dan also risk venturing out.
All they find left of him is scattered meat and bone. Whatever the giant apes dined on previously has evidently now been denied to them by Mount Rainier. So, they’ve found something else to eat. The community thus defers to Mostar, who prepares it for war …
Review
Anyone who knows their great apes knows they are not to be trifled with. Once you are out there in the wild, our closest relatives on the evolutionary scale can be our most dangerous enemies. Intelligent, ferocious, incredibly strong and aggressively tribal, the ape and monkey species of the world can pose a very serious threat to any human who, intentionally or otherwise, wanders into their domain. This is a fact of life as we know it. But now imagine that they each stand to about eight or nine feet tall and weigh in at about 490lbs, and that you are deep in their territory but can’t get away because Nature has conspired against it.
This is the premise of Devolution, Max Brooks’ latest epistolatory horror-adventure. And it’s a genuinely terrifying one, even more so as the human enclave soon being encroached on by the sasquatch clan is weaker than you might normally find. This is the land of gun ownership, but they don’t have any guns. This is the land of the outdoorsman, but there are no outdoorsmen here. Greenloop is all about sustainable living, but it can’t sustain itself even for a week when its power has been cut.
As I worked my way through the first half of the book – which is a real ‘slow burn’, I have to say – all these facts were gnawing on me. It struck me from the outset that this deluded techno-hipster community was vastly more vulnerable than even its most enlightened member realised. That it was, in fact, ripe for the plucking. Of course, it only makes things worse that, even though the residents of Greenloop don’t know about it, we readers are well aware – because we’ve been told in advance – of the savage forces gathering in the encircling forest.
I found that idea alone intensely frightening. And it doesn’t get any easier the more the Greenloop residents realise what they are up against, because there is nothing they can do about it anyway. Nothing obvious, at least. When the battle commences, it’s every bit as violently one-sided as you would expect, though the humans increasingly show ingenuity and aggression of their own, slowly but surely evening the score.
And it’s this that makes Devolution more than just another scary creature-feature.
As with Brooks’ thumping first success, World War Z, the author, while he’s undoubtedly keen to tell a rattling good terror tale, is also interested here in how humanity would respond to such an assault (in effect, how quickly and effectively they could and would go to war). In the first book it was the world-scale response. In this one, it’s the world in miniature.
The Greenloop community comprises a diverse assortment of interesting characters, all with their own strengths and flaws. Some reviewers have accused Brooks of wasting time with this.
‘We know they’re all going to die anyway, so why bother building them up?’
But for me that’s missing the point. First of all, Brooks, as all good fiction writers should, is ensuring that these characters in peril are characters we care about. If they’re just blank sheets it won’t matter if they get torn apart. Secondly, and this I think is his real aim, he’s putting us – mankind – in the frame. It takes all sorts to make a human community, with the usual exception of deadly fighters and square-jawed heroes. Because let’s be honest, in how many communities in the world do those people actually exist? One response to Devolution has been to sneer at how ineffectual this bunch of latter-day middle-class hippies actually are, to laugh at how easily they are picked off by monstrous brutes with far lower intellects, to say smugly that this is the outcome of easy living and over-reliance on technology. But how many of the rest of us don’t fall into that same category? How many of the rest of us wouldn’t make it out of the wild woods alive if we were abandoned there, with or without the presence of giant, man-eating apes?
However, this isn’t a situation that will remain unchanged.
It’s a near certainty that humans, when they are under attack, will eventually counterattack. We are a notoriously belligerent race in our own right. We mastered the beasts when we had very little to fight them with save sticks and stones. So, in Devolution, the hominids don’t have it all their own way.
By this, I don’t mean to say that Max Brooks goes all The Hills Have Eyes on us. It’s not the case here that those who are seemingly innocent at the start of it eventually are so abused that they become abusers themselves. That said, they demonstrate a significant degree of devolution. Particularly Kate Holland, whose disappearance at the end of the narrative may not be down to the predators having dragged her off into the trees.
The big question is does it all work?
Well, for me the answer is a resounding yes, for various reasons.
Not all reviewers have appreciated the epistolary style, which, as I’ve already mentioned, was also used in World War Z, but for me it adds a classic horror vibe. The presence of Bigfoot in the North American backwoods is still a matter of debate. Is he there, or isn’t he? It’s an age-old mystery with its roots in Native American lore, a definitive answer still elusive thanks to the sparsity of hard evidence. And this novel simply adds to that.
Is Kate Holland’s journal for real? Did these things genuinely happen, or was she driven crazy by horror and despair at the deaths of her friends during a volcanic catastrophe? No certain answer is possible, so ultimately, along with all those bits of grainy film and curious late-night audio recordings we can these days check out on YouTube, it can never be anything more than yet another fragment of a clue, the authenticity of which can only be guessed at.
This also puts it in the category of ‘found footage’ horror, or perhaps ‘found text’, though that in itself is nothing new; it harks back to the classic days of Bram Stoker, HP Lovecraft and Weird Tales. However, it also serves a functional purpose. Though I strongly doubt that anyone could recollect conversations of days earlier so perfectly word-for-word that you could reproduce them in a diary and they’d read as smoothly as they do here, which is perhaps one overarching weakness of Devolution, I’m prepared to give leeway because I can’t help thinking that telling this story as a straight narrative, particularly as so much of the first half of it concerns Greenloop world-building, I can’t help thinking it would drag too much in the build-up.
All round, Devolution is a superior horror novel, a good old-fashioned monster story, with a strong Man v Nature subtext, which is particularly pertinent in this age, when we all unquestioningly support green issues, and yet should perhaps be cautious that we don’t get exactly what we wish for. It’s a wild world out there; we’ve conquered a lot of it, but it wouldn’t take much for it to conquer us back.
For once, I’m not going to bother with my homegrown casting choices for a movie version of Devolution, as Legendary Entertainment optioned it on publication, and, according to the Hollywood Reporter last year, had appointed James Ashcroft to direct (mockumentary style, by all accounts), and that trailers may hit the internet before the end of this year.
(As always, most of the artwork on this post has been snaffled while it was floating around on the Internet uncredited. However, the upright image of the autumn woodland was created by Johnny G. If any of the others would like to step forward, I will be delighted to credit them as well, or, if required, take the pictures down).
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