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. Satisfying if not particularly surprising or original.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. It’s a formidable what's-going-on scenario, told from the point of view of a character who has every reason to be unreliable, that merited further development rather than just a slam-dunk ending.
According to Qatik and Qanik-they refer to their group as the "hive," and neither expects to survive the trek-there are other, similar, survivors.
Qanik and Qatik, the mules, don radiation-resistant suits, but Horkai needs none more, he can heal from any injury and seems to be immortal. To get Horkai where he needs to go, two "mules," placid, literal minded individuals of limited intelligence, will carry him. Horkai's legs are useless and, according to Rasmus, he needs regular injections in his spine to stop a lethal disease spreading upwards to his brain. Rasmus, the leader of the group, tells Horkai that he is the group's "fixer," needed to retrieve a mysterious cylinder that has been stolen by a rival group. Following the Kollaps, the landscape is pocked with craters, scarred by violence and poisoned by radiation only a few scattered groups cling to survival in shelters and caves. In this combination of two classic science fiction tropes-the post-apocalyptic future and the protagonist who has no memory-a man who may or may not be named Josef Horkai wakes from what he is told has been 30 years of cold-sleep storage. Realization of what appeared, briefly and fictionally, as a "hypothetical" novel in one of Evenson's ( Last Days, 2009, etc.) previous works.
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