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. 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. In any event, nothing shapely or persuasive emerges from this mass of squirming, mismatched parts.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. Too fractured to succeed as metaphor neither does it connect as allegory: Tepper can't decide whether to warn against a gathering spiritual darkness, lament the collapse of an aesthetic ideal, or thunder against global eco-disaster. Beginning in 14th-century England, Beauty's various adventures (including a trip to the 21st century, where magic has vanished altogether) give rise to several well-known fairy tales but in her long efforts to evade the Dark Lord, Beauty loses her fairy-given immortality her fairy mother cares nothing for her and only in the far future, after life as we know it has been extinguished, will Mother Earth (the glowing object is an embodiment of all Earthly life) be reborn.
As part of the plan, they conceal within the body of half-fairy, half-human Beauty a mysterious glowing object. Most of the inhabitants of Faery care nothing for the evil Dark Lord only the good fairies Caraboose and Israfel make long- range plans to defeat him. From the author of Raising the Stones (1990), etc., a Faery- inspired meditation on a dying Earth.
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