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He is to stay on the island for a month and write reports for Extremely Upper Management, which warns him to be especially meticulous in his observations. When Extremely Upper Management sends for Linus, he learns that his next assignment is a mission to an island orphanage for especially dangerous kids. Linus clings to the notion that his job is about saving children from cruel or dangerous homes, but really he’s a cog in a government machine that treats magical children as second-class citizens. Linus Baker loves rules, which makes him perfectly suited for his job as a midlevel bureaucrat working for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, where he investigates orphanages for children who can do things like make objects float, who have tails or feathers, and even those who are young witches.

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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.Ī tightly wound caseworker is pushed out of his comfort zone when he’s sent to observe a remote orphanage for magical children. 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. Perching on the rim of the real and the unreal, precariously vacillating, this effort is marred by some obvious, unexplained and distracting inconsistencies.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. His escape is deviously engineered and the outcome of the war guarantees to be a compromise. When he became convinced that the colonists were right and tried to join them he was brainwashed by the isolationists, regressed to scenes of his childhood and continued his predictions, through the contest, without ethical conflicts. Ragle's heightened ability to discern patterns had been used to predict and prepare for colonist missiles. After an attempted escape, Ragle and Vincent break through the borders of the town, discover that the year is actually 1998 and that for three years a civil war has been raging between the moon colonists - lunatics-and the earth isolationists. Ragle Gumm, 46, lived with his sister Margo and his brother-in-law Vincent and earned his living by consistently winning a daily newspaper contest labeled Where Will the Little Green Man Be Next? Ragle has moments when his world, recognizably 1959, disappears he is left alone, seemingly thrust through a hole in the universe, and in place of his surroundings he finds cryptic pieces of paper - one word messages.

This is a fast moving excursion into a fantasy world of the future.