Devolution

This book is good, I do not regret buying or reading it and if you enjoyed WWZ there's a very good chance you'll also like this.Max Brooks never has a problem writing compelling characters. The research is thorough and doesn't get in the way.The premise, idyllic tech company community cut off in nature, by nature is an acceptable horror one.But that's it. It's acceptable. It's safe. It's repeating the tried and tested of WWZ which went off the wall in interesting ways.The villains didn't compel, the art doesn't _sing_ with the glorious touch of having fun writing it that really spoke to me in the first books. That's why I didn't give it 5 stars.And then I remembered that star ratings suck, so I'm giving it 5 stars but only because Amazon considers 4* a failure.

So when you’ve written a book as awesome as World War Z anything you write after it is going to be compared and let’s face it is going to have to be perfect to be better.This book isn’t perfect but it is still a good read. It uses a similar style to WWZ with some interviews and quotes. The majority of it is in a diary/journal and because of this it looses some tension as you know that the person writing the journal will survive what they are writing about because they are writing after the event took place. You are also getting a view of the other characters through their eyes which means they are not fully fleshed out (how could they be as this person barely knows most of them).After a slow start this book gets going and I have to admit I was glad I was reading this in a nice suburban setting and not in a remote cabin somewhere. Pretty sure I would have lost a lot of sleep! It’s style has you almost believing this actually took place (I have no idea how much of the history included is accurate - I will be looking it up after this) and even living where I do it got me thinking about how secure my house would be against this kind of attack.Totally worth a read if you enjoyed WWZ and/or are a believer in Sasquatch.

I struggled with the first third of the book but once the actions starts it's non stop and an enjoyable ride.

I rather enjoyed a story where city folk in the USA try to live completely off the grid in a manufactured "Eden", where they get all the benefits of city life while living in the wild, only for it to all blow up in their faces, literally, when a volcanic eruption causes catastrophe and cuts off the small community completely. The people who set it all up abruptly discover that, without access to the technology they are so used to, there is a very good chance that they will not survive in the wild through the winter-and they respond by insisting that the Emergency Services will save them.Fortunately, some of the people in the community are well aware that they have to stay alive through their own efforts until rescue, which could days or weeks or even months with a disaster on this scale, so they set up for the long haul as best they can. Including an unhappily Married young woman, whose diary tells the story. Only, one night, the young wife see's the impossible in the woods, then they find footprints so much larger than human they cannot work it out. Then Bigfoot comes into the community itself...The volcanic eruption forces the movement of Bigfoot to new hunting grounds, the new Eden just happens to be full of "food". With no weapons, little equipment, no communications and no escape from a being who can likely outrun a car? The community is in very, very serious trouble...The characters are a mixed bag, the successful businessman and his ex-model wife, a lesbian couple with an Adopted daughter, an old man in deteriorating health who is a successful author and others. But the story is clever in slowly cutting them away from weekly consults with Psychiatrists, failure in business efforts and the clout that money and power gives to show just who they REALLY are when they have nothing but what they can wield or create with their bare hands and a 3d printer. When you are being hunted right into your own home by a monster that can punch through stone and bend steel bare-handed while trying to catch, kill and eat you? Everything changes.Interviews with the brother of the woman who wrote the diary, who has since disappeared after the Eden was destroyed, a senior Ranger still trying to clean up the mess after the eruption and others help to flesh out the story. It also states that Federal Agents made all the evidence of what happened go away after the new Eden was rediscovered, not that anyone who has seen the place and had a chance to read the diary has any doubts...In conclusion, a good book with some very unusual "bad guys" which the author made work in his story. Not World War Z, but well worth a read.