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. Much rests on Lucy’s precarious likability and the questionable power of her first-person narrative.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. Plot goes round and round without much forward movement. Lucy grapples with all of these ghosts and, in the process, seeks the truth about her father’s death. One minute, the baby was incurring the wrath of passengers with his relentless screaming the next, he’s dead. Lucy’s young life was a series of losses: her baby brother Nicky drowned in the ocean just as Eric did, triggering madness in her mother a childhood friend died in a tragic accident teenage boyfriend Robert survived a near-fatal car crash, then broke up with her Lucy’s infant son Stevie died of SIDS, leading to the collapse of her marriage to stolid Scott, Eric’s surprising choice for executor of his estate and mother’s chilling favorite story, told frequently to the young Lucy, relates the mysterious death of her own baby brother, while she (just a girl herself) and the family rode a Russian train. (Lucy claims to have been holed up in her apartment the entire time, while in reality she shared a romantic California getaway with her married lover Kent.) She parries intermittently with a couple of intrusive police detectives, as well as sister Julie and cousin Sasha and older Russian relatives. Her evasiveness regarding her whereabouts on the weekend her father died doesn’t help matters. Moreover, for a while, she seems to be a suspect. It’s only after she arrives that Lucy learns it was likely murder. High-powered New York investment banker Lucy Schaffer flies warily back to her childhood home in northern California upon learning that her father Eric, a professor of geology and Russian émigré, has drowned. Estranged daughter returns home to bury her father and faces a pack of morbid memories, along with a middling murder mystery.
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