Devolution by Max Brooks

 

Questions for Book Club January 15, 2022

1. Max Brooks writes: "I will let you judge for yourself if the following pages seem reasonably plausible." Do they? Does the premise of the novel—that Bigfoot exists—feel plausible to you? Why or why not?

2. Who, or what, are the Sasquatches, as portrayed in Devolution? Do you believe they exist? Does Max Brooks?

3. What was your experience reading Devolution? Did you find it suspenseful, frightening, gory, instructive? Something else? Or were you left, well… unmoved?

4. Talk about the tech-pioneers who formed the utopian community of Greenloop? What is their hope moving into a primeval rain forest—while still remaining linked to civilization by internet? Do you sympathize with their idealism, find them naive, or maybe hypocritical?

5. Whom in the novel are you most irritated by or impatient with? Which character do you most admire?

6. After Rainier's eruption, how and why does Mostar begin preparing for catastrophe—even though Greenloop is miles from the volcano and undamaged? Why is she the only community member who worries, while the rest remain blissfully unaware and unprepared?

7. What do you think of Brooks's use of Kate Holland's diary. Along with the fact that is the "first-hand account" mentioned in the book's subtitle, what else does it add? Does the diary enhance the story? Do you feel it builds suspense or does it drag down the pace? Also, what do you think of Kate, herself?

8. Brooks is known for his zombie survival guides. How does this book double as a survival manual? What is the advice it offers people living through cataclysmic events?  

9. The novel also takes potshots at society—at bad behavior, not just on the part of the Sasquatches but also on the part of humans. What social criticism does Brooks offer about the larger society?

10. Should this book be classified as fiction or nonfiction? Joke there… though not to some: Bigfoot has a devoted following, people who are absolutely convinced Bigfoot exists. Why such intensely passionate followers? Why do people continue to insist on Bigfoot/Yeti's existence? Any ideas? Are you a devotee? Do you know people who are?

About the Author

Maximillian Michael Brooks is an American actor and author, best known for his novel World War Z (2006) and its related "survival guides." More recently he published the thriller/suspense novel, Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre (2020). Brooks is also a lecturer at the Modern War Institute at West Point, New York.

Early life
Brooks, the son of actress Anne Bancroft and director, producer, writer, and actor Mel Brooks, is dyslexic. In a 2017 interview with NPR's Terry Gross, Brooks recalled what it was like growing up in the 1970s before dyslexia was understood:

[T]hey didn't even call it a disability back then; it was just "laziness," "goofing off…." And my mother, one of the greatest, most successful actresses of her day, gave up her career… to be my educational advocate and to teach herself about dyslexia.… She… had [my school books] all read onto audio cassette, so I could listen to my reading list. And if I hadn't been able to do that, I wouldn't have graduated from high school.… [N]ot only did my mother give me my life, she saved my life.

Brooks earned a BA in history from Pitzer College in Claremont, California, and he also pursued graduate work in film at American University in Washington, D.C.

Why Do So Many People Still Want to Believe in Bigfoot?

The appeal of the mythical, wild man holds strong

Ben Crair

September 2018

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Bigfoot is still a big deal to many conspiracy theorists.

Sixty years ago this fall, Bigfoot first stepped into the public consciousness. “Giant footprints puzzle residents,” a headline in the Humboldt Times announced. The small Northern California newspaper reported that a road construction crew had discovered human like footprints that were a massive 16 inches long. The paper was the first to give the mysterious animal that made the prints its memorable moniker—“Bigfoot”—and the creature has been stomping through the American imagination ever since.

Today, the legendary beast seems to be everywhere: You will find Bigfoot looking awfully cute this year in two children’s films: The Son of Bigfoot and Smallfoot. Animal Planet recently aired the finale of its popular series “Finding Bigfoot,” which lasted 11 seasons despite never making good on the promise of its title. And the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization lists at least one report from every state, except Hawaii, over the past two decades. The most recent sighting, in June 2018, was by a woman in Florida who reported a creature that looked like “a large pile of soggy grass.” Other evidence in the database includes supposed Bigfoot scat, nests and noises. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, it may not make a sound—but it seems someone will report that a Bigfoot knocked it over.

“Interest in the existence of the creature is at an all-time high,” the paleontologist Darren Naish has observed, even though “there’s nothing even close to compelling as goes the evidence.”

Of course, Bigfoot is not the first fabled hominid to roam North America. Sasquatches long populated the mythologies of American Indian tribes in the Pacific Northwest, but those 1958 footprints transformed the myth into a media sensation. The tracks were planted near Bluff Creek in Northern California by a man named Ray Wallace—but his prank was not revealed until his death in 2002, when his children said it had all been “just a joke.”

By that point, more important evidence had entered the Bigfoot file. In 1967, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin filmed a few seconds of a hairy creature walking on two legs by the same Bluff Creek—the most famous and contested piece of Bigfoot “evidence” to this day. That the Patterson-Gimlin film was created in the same place that Wallace had staged his hoax is just one reason to doubt its authenticity. Skeptics say the animal was a man in costume, while believers argue that the creature’s movements and body proportions cannot possibly have been human. The debate has been raging for half a century, which raises a question of its own. “How is it that the evidence has not gotten any better despite the exponential increase in the quantity and quality of cameras?” asks Benjamin Radford, a research fellow with the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

Still the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence either. Wild animals don’t exactly mug for photos, and the planet’s ever-shrinking forests still regularly unpack surprises, such as the saola, an untamed cousin of the cow that was discovered by scientists in Vietnam in 1992. But the saola did not have legions of amateurs hunting it with cameras. With or without hard evidence, many people clearly want to believe in Bigfoot. Which suggests we are dealing more with human imagination than human evolution.

Naish has written that Bigfoot is the modern American “manifestation of a human-wide cultural concept, not a zoological reality.” It has much in common with the Australian yowie and the Himalayan yeti: an upright posture, shaggy hair and, of course, large feet. As so-called wild men, they hold a crude mirror up to our own species: What might Homo sapiens be like if civilization had not removed it from nature?

Fact or Folklore

Can you tell the real animals from the fake ones? Hover over each animal to reveal if it is fact or folklore. (Illustration by Iris Gottlieb)

Illustrations by Iris Gottlieb

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Some people see these cryptohominids as symbols of pure freedom, living by instinct and foiling every effort to pin them down. To search for Bigfoot in the forest is to taste that freedom. On the trail, you become extra-attuned to nature: the smell of scat, the sounds of breaking branches, the curious impressions in the dirt. As long as there are wild places in America, Bigfoot remains a possibility that, to its most ardent proponents, cannot be disproved.

The hunt for Bigfoot emulates an earlier mode of discovery, when new knowledge was not the product of advanced degrees and expensive machinery but rather curiosity, bravery, patience and survival. In the 19th century, the American landscape revealed its majesties to ordinary settlers pushing westward into territory unmapped by Europeans. To track Bigfoot today is to channel that frontier spirit (as well as to appropriate Native American traditions).

Bigfoot also embodies other less romantic but no less enduring American traits, like gullibility and a hunger for attention. “There are so many fake videos,” says Loren Coleman, the founder of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine. The problem has grown worse with social media, where viral hoaxes, like drone footage of a supposed Bigfoot in a clearing in Idaho, can rack up millions of views. Coleman, for his part, believes there is evidence for Bigfoot’s existence, but he and his like-minded peers find it difficult to focus attention on this material amid the growing number of obvious shams. “Technology has ruined the old cryptozoology,” Coleman says.

His complaint echoes concerns in more mainstream American life, where technologies that promised to build consensus have, in fact, made the truth more difficult than ever to discern. On the internet, Bigfoot has found a habitat much more hospitable than North American forests. It turns out that Bigfoot does not need to exist in order to live forever.

The Iceman Cameth

The amazing story of the infamous frozen “missing link” from Minnesota—and the dogged scientist hot on its trail.

November 1968 | Incredible Discovery

(Illustration by Iris Gottlieb)

Showman Frank Hansen exhibits the “Iceman”—a Bigfoot-like creature encased in ice—at the International Livestock Exposition in Chicago. This “relic of the ice age,” he claims, was found in the waters off Siberia. The news soon reaches Ivan T. Sanderson of the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained.

December 1968 | Reality Test

(costello 1984)

Sanderson and Bernard Heuvelmans of the Royal Institute of Natural Sciences of Belgium examine the creature in a trailer in Minnesota. “We considered this to be a genuine and unique example of a most priceless specimen,” Sanderson writes to John Napier, director of primate biology at the Smithsonian.

Winter 1969 | The Missing Link?

(AB medi)

In a scientific journal, Heuvelmans declares he has discovered a new species of man, Homo pongoides. Napier decides to investigate: “The Smithsonian feels they have an obligation not only to science but to the general public to determine for themselves the significance of this specimen.” Hansen won’t let him see the body.

April 1969 | FBI to Smithsonian: Good Luck

(FBI)

The Smithsonian appeals to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover for help. Hoover declines, citing “the absence of a violation of a Federal law within our investigative jurisdiction.” Napier reports that U.S. Customs will look into it; the body, after all, was supposedly imported. Meanwhile, Hansen puts a “model” of the specimen on display.
 

May 1969 | Hurray for Hollywood

(US National Library of Medicine / National Institute of Health)

Without access to the body, Napier studies photos and videos. The Smithsonian also calls Hollywood prop houses—and finds one that admits it created the Iceman in 1967. The Smithsonian announces it is “satisfied that the ‘creature’ is simply a carnival exhibit made of latex rubber and hair.” Today, the creature lives at Austin’s Museum of the Weird.