PRETEND PLUMBER | Kirkus Reviews

Are we not males? We’re—nicely, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does on this pleasant yarn, following on his bestseller World Struggle Z (2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one factor. A volcanic eruption is kind of one other, for, because the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ newest places it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological facet, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most individuals.” Possibly, however the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if solely out of self-defense. Brooks locations the epicenter of the Bigfoot warfare in a high-tech hideaway populated by the type of individuals you would possibly discover in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know find out how to do a lot of something however tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding coronary heart, the know-it-all mental who seems to know the fallacious issues, the immigrant with a troublesome backstory and an intuition for survival. Certainly, the novel does double obligation as a survival handbook, packed full of fine recommendation—for example, strive to not get wounded, for “harm turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking over our assets, our time to take care of you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot on this planet whereas peppering his narrative with well timed social criticism about unhealthy conduct on the human facet of the battle: The explosion of Rainier may need been higher forecast had the president not slashed the finances of the U.S. Geological Survey, resulting in “fast suspension of the Nationwide Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s at all times somebody round trying to monetize the pure catastrophe and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a professional at constructing suspense even when it performs out in some relatively spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a brief spear that takes its identify from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the useless man’s coronary heart and lungs.” Grossness apart, it places you proper there on the scene.

A tasty, if not at all times tasteful, story of supernatural mayhem that followers of King and Crichton alike will get pleasure from.