Okay, so I'm on another horror novel kick. Happens every once in a while. I have a soft spot for horror novels--and when I say 'horror novels', I mean those in the 'literary' category, and especially in the American tradition. One needs to note as well that the term 'horror' covers a whole host of types, from those dealing with one horrific creature or another to those dealing with hauntings or ghosts to those which simply tread the thin line between what we think to be real and whatever else might possibly be real. I like the landscape that the horror novel provides for the unfettered exploration of all manner of subjects, social, psychological, historical, political, cultural.
Devolution, subtitled 'A First Hand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre' is both a horror novel (featuring in this case actual monsters in the form of Sasquatch) and a dystopian novel given that its setting is that of a cutting edge eco-community in the thick of the untamed Mt. Rainier wilderness. As with so many erstwhile utopias, these modern day pioneers, as with the Brook Farm commune members of Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, as with Jack London's Yukon prospectors, have failed to appreciate the overwhelming power of the wilderness that encompasses them. They think of nature in terms of a new, more fully informed and sophisticated 'relationship', a touchy-feely sort of mutually respectful cooperation. They do not understand that nature itself doesn't give a damn about their relationship. To the wild, mankind is either wholly superfluous or, in the case of sentient creatures, a threat.
"Do you know," Brooks writes, "that more people are hurt by bison in North America than by sharks all over the world? Do you know why? Because they try to ride them. Tourists from New York or Tokyo, whatever urban bubble, literally try to jump on the buffaloes’ backs. Feed them, hug them, take selfies with them. They think they’re at a petting zoo, or in a Disney movie. They’ve never learned the real rules, so they think they can just make up their own. This is called anthropomorphizing. This is why families let their little kids play around coyotes, why the Venice Beach “Grizzly Man” tried to live among Alaskan bears, why a whole town in Colorado couldn’t imagine that mountain lions would ever be a threat to human beings. All these overeducated, isolated city dwellers who idealize the natural world."
Devolution, subtitled 'A First Hand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre' is both a horror novel (featuring in this case actual monsters in the form of Sasquatch) and a dystopian novel given that its setting is that of a cutting edge eco-community in the thick of the untamed Mt. Rainier wilderness. As with so many erstwhile utopias, these modern day pioneers, as with the Brook Farm commune members of Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, as with Jack London's Yukon prospectors, have failed to appreciate the overwhelming power of the wilderness that encompasses them. They think of nature in terms of a new, more fully informed and sophisticated 'relationship', a touchy-feely sort of mutually respectful cooperation. They do not understand that nature itself doesn't give a damn about their relationship. To the wild, mankind is either wholly superfluous or, in the case of sentient creatures, a threat.
"Do you know," Brooks writes, "that more people are hurt by bison in North America than by sharks all over the world? Do you know why? Because they try to ride them. Tourists from New York or Tokyo, whatever urban bubble, literally try to jump on the buffaloes’ backs. Feed them, hug them, take selfies with them. They think they’re at a petting zoo, or in a Disney movie. They’ve never learned the real rules, so they think they can just make up their own. This is called anthropomorphizing. This is why families let their little kids play around coyotes, why the Venice Beach “Grizzly Man” tried to live among Alaskan bears, why a whole town in Colorado couldn’t imagine that mountain lions would ever be a threat to human beings. All these overeducated, isolated city dwellers who idealize the natural world."
"Nature is pure. Nature is real. Connecting with nature brings out the best in you. That’s what I hear from the poor dumb dipshits who come up here every year in their new REI outfits, never having felt dirt under their feet, just aching to lose themselves in the Garden of Eden. And then a few days later we find them crawling through the muck, half-starved, dehydrated, nursing some gangrenous wound. They all want to live “in harmony with nature” before some of them realize, too late, that nature is anything but harmonious."
Well, things go bad for the fully automated, solar paneled, biofueled, cyber-equipped, 'self sufficient' eco-community when Mt. Rainier suddenly erupts, sending ash and fire and suffocating mud flows down its slopes, driving animals from the high places and Sasquatch troops from the highest, most hidden of high places, all of them looking for food and sustenance as winter comes on. Preparedness for even moderate disasters has been dismantled by government cuts under the current administration (wonder who Brooks could be talking about here) and to make things worse yet, unrelated social unrest has broken out across the country. There are riots in cities like Seattle and Tacoma, there is a random shooter on the I-5, tangling traffic. The savage wild, symbolized in the towering brutal Sasquatch, has come down from the hills--not to make friends, but to eat, which the pilgrims soon discover by being one-by-one eaten.
Sasquatch lore has always been particularly rich in the Rainier wilderness--and it is a land of stunning wildness, some of the densest forest I have ever seen. I remember once walking just a short distance into the trees and suddenly experiencing the panic of being completely unable to find the little road I had just come from. I did come out, of course, but not nearly where I had left it. It is not difficult for me to imagine that all kinds of critters might be secreted among those ridges and gullies. It is beautiful, yes; transcendentally beautiful. But it took only twenty minutes or so of being lost to understand that it was not my friend.
Devolution is a novel that deals not so much with mythical creatures as with the actual fragility of civilization and the human conceit of absolute dominance. One of the special ironies of our time is that, as divorced as we are from the natural world from which we came, we imagine that we understand and relate to it better than did our ancestors. We think of this as modern sophistication. It is in fact merely arrogance.
Well, things go bad for the fully automated, solar paneled, biofueled, cyber-equipped, 'self sufficient' eco-community when Mt. Rainier suddenly erupts, sending ash and fire and suffocating mud flows down its slopes, driving animals from the high places and Sasquatch troops from the highest, most hidden of high places, all of them looking for food and sustenance as winter comes on. Preparedness for even moderate disasters has been dismantled by government cuts under the current administration (wonder who Brooks could be talking about here) and to make things worse yet, unrelated social unrest has broken out across the country. There are riots in cities like Seattle and Tacoma, there is a random shooter on the I-5, tangling traffic. The savage wild, symbolized in the towering brutal Sasquatch, has come down from the hills--not to make friends, but to eat, which the pilgrims soon discover by being one-by-one eaten.
Sasquatch lore has always been particularly rich in the Rainier wilderness--and it is a land of stunning wildness, some of the densest forest I have ever seen. I remember once walking just a short distance into the trees and suddenly experiencing the panic of being completely unable to find the little road I had just come from. I did come out, of course, but not nearly where I had left it. It is not difficult for me to imagine that all kinds of critters might be secreted among those ridges and gullies. It is beautiful, yes; transcendentally beautiful. But it took only twenty minutes or so of being lost to understand that it was not my friend.
Devolution is a novel that deals not so much with mythical creatures as with the actual fragility of civilization and the human conceit of absolute dominance. One of the special ironies of our time is that, as divorced as we are from the natural world from which we came, we imagine that we understand and relate to it better than did our ancestors. We think of this as modern sophistication. It is in fact merely arrogance.
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