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Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.Ī tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S.
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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.
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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. Labienus, you see, loathes and despises the humans he supposedly serves, because their swarming, unchecked masses pollute the pure Earth he once cherished as the cruel Sumerian god Enlil.įunny, heart-rending, terrifying, pellucid, Baker’s magnificent series grows in stature with every installment.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. Unwittingly serving Labienus’s purposes, Victor deactivates cyborg Lewis when Lewis has come upon too much of the truth, confronts the ancient Neanderthal Enforcer, Budu, Labienus’s former teacher, now a rival for power, and duly spreads a plague that selectively kills thousands of mortals. Devious, expert manipulator Labienus seeks to outfox his rival Aegeus by suborning Victor, Aegeus’s innocent, trusting assistant Facilitator. Zeus in 2355, the year beyond which no time travelers can penetrate. Unknown to their mortal masters, however, the cyborg Executive Facilitators are plotting to take over Dr. Zeus created a race of immortal cyborgs who loot the past to enrich their masters (they grab anything valuable that historians say was lost or destroyed). In the 24th century, childlike mortal geniuses run Dr. Zeus having discovered time travel, it set about rearranging the past to suit its own obscure ends and ensure its own existence.
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Another installment in Baker’s incomparable multi-volume time-travel saga ( The Life of the World to Come, 2004, etc.), a seamless “fix-up” of six previously published stories.
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