Devolution

I received an Advance Reader’s Edition of Devolution by Max Brooks from the publisher (Del Rey) in exchange for an honest review. Devolution is scheduled for release on May 12, 2020.

Devolution takes place in a small ecocommunity outside Seattle. Kate and her husband have just joined the planned community and are working through the logistics of living in a house intended to have minimal impact on the planet. As they are adjusting, Mt. Rainier erupts, sending out lahars that cut off the roads into the tiny community as well as the power and all lines of communication with the world outside.

The eruption also disrupts the wildlife. A troop of Sasquatch that have remained distant from humans, living in the woods, are forced out into the open in their search for food. Eating the people in the isolated community is an option.

This story is told by Max Brooks as the narrator. He takes the role of an investigative journalist looking into what has been named the Greenloop massacre. He interviews Kate’s brother, rangers and rescue personnel in the area, and has access to the journal Kate left in her house when she disappeared 13 months ago. As a reader, we alternate between Kate’s journal entries and Max’s interviews and notes.

Since the bulk of the book consists of Kate’s journal, we get to know Kate the best of all the characters. What makes this interesting is that she is not a reflective person. Most of her entries describe events that happened, or her perceptions of the people around her. We end up learning more about Kate’s relationships with those around her (such as her husband) than we do about Kate herself. It also means that our view of the other characters is filtered through Kate’s lens, limiting how well we get to know them.

What was particularly well done here was the setting. Max and Kate do a great job of describing the planned community and the lands around it. While reading, I found myself imagining I was in one of the houses, with the tall woods around me, Sasquatch booming at us through the trees.

I found a lot of echoes of our own current events in the novel as well. Given the timing of publication, there is no way this was intentional, as the current pandemic was not in place when Brooks wrote this novel. Kate and the community find themselves cut off, both in terms of communication, and supplies. They are forced to figure out how to survive with they have in their handful of homes. Via car radios, they catch snippets of news reports describing chaos and riots in Seattle, as a society used to only having on hand what is needed for the next day struggles to get access to food and other supplies. Some of what happens in this fictional Seattle matches what we’ve experienced in our own recent days, while in other ways our reality has taken a different path.

Overall, Devolution was an entertaining, and sometimes uncomfortable, read. Be prepared for tension, some gore, and a lot of questions about the difference between human and wild.