I'm probably coming off harder on this book than needed. I assume then the implication is the bigfoot were trapped in a hidden valley on the other side and the mining let them out? I'm not sure, it wasn't clear - honestly other than wanting a cold opening where people die the prologue was superfluous. The chapter mentions sunlight coming through a crack in back of the cave, so I took this to be a Chekhov's gun that would appear later in the story, but it never did. I kept assuming it would have some relevance later on, but it doesn't - neither they or the mining activity is raised throughout the book.
But one major plot hole I felt was the prologue - which features a bunch of miners performing illegal digging. It does actually in its second half it plots starts deviating from Devolution, at which point it becomes more interesting. Its pulp, people will introduced, then die, not much more to it. It just comes off as corny, nobody talks like that. Yes, I get it, the main character from Devolution also loved Princess Bride, and her husband quotes the film line "As you wish" to her at one point, but Devil's Desk decided to up the anti by having its characters dropping quotes and one liners from movies all over the place - and of course giving context to the quote when another characted doesn't get it, just to make sure the listener/reader gets it too. Worse, some are annoying some are needlessly self destructive eg making suicidally stupid desicions or having dialogue that is primary swearing or sex jokes or characters constantly making cultural in-joke references from anything from Princess Bride to South Park.
They are just your standard pulp horror red-shirts who exist to die. I didn't care for the characters in Devil's Desk. I also liked it's characters, and felt genuine terror for their wellbeing. It was as much a story about humans being unprepared for disaster, as much as being unprepared for random bigfoot attack. IF I read this before Devolution I think I'd say it was the best Bigfoot book I'd read (and I've read a fair number) but I didn't, I couldn't help but compare it unfavourably against the book the author himself admits he was inspired by. What's follows is an okay pulp horror: lots of characters dying very brutal deaths one by one. Just as with Devolution, a small group of people come under attack from a tribe of bigfoot after a natural disaster cuts them off from rescue (just this is set in Alaska rather than Washington, and it's an earthquake rather than a volcano eruption). That the author in his end credits admits this book is inspired by Max Brook's Devolution did not surprise me - all while listening to this I was thinking "This is Devolution, if Devolution was pulp horror".
A pulp horror version of Max Brook's Devolution
0 kommentar(er)
