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. But Hallet won’t let his little girl go without a fight.Ī romp through the frozen woods on the trail of a killer who’s also hunting you can be satisfying, but this debut is a rabbit snare that comes up empty time and again.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. The enemies she encounters in nature (like a 600-pound brown bear) aren’t nearly as vile as the majority of humans she meets, save for the resourceful (and specifically literate) Penelope, Elka’s only true friend. When Elka discovers Hallet’s true nature-and that she’s on the hook for the killings, too-she sets off to find her real parents, who left her with her grandmother years earlier to go in search of gold. Elka herself strains credulity, as Lewis attempts, unsuccessfully, to create a unique dialect-substituting, for example, “a’” for “of”-for a character whose motivations, and intellectual abilities, fluctuate wildly.

His real name, Elka learns, is Kreager Hallet, and he’s a wanted man, pursued relentlessly by the steely-eyed, six-shooter–carrying magistrate Jennifer Lyon, who’s so much a caricature from the Old West that it’s hard to take her seriously.

But Trapper doesn’t just kill deer: he kills people. In the wake of a thunderhead, superstorms common after an unnamed Rapture-like event decimated the population, he rescued her at age 7 and taught her all the things a woodsy father does: hunting, shooting, skinning.

A girl on the run in a post-apocalyptic wilderness soon realizes that your past can not only haunt you, it can kill you.Įlka, now 17, can barely remember a time when she didn’t live deep in the woods of BeeCee (presumably British Columbia) with a man she calls Trapper.

The wolf road by beth lewis