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. Now Marr presents the cherry on the sundae: Claire learns that Chet’s about to be paroled, and he wants to see her and become every inch the father he should’ve been back then.Ī deep, deep dive into unspeakable memories and their unimaginably shocking legacy.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. “This isn’t my first stalker,” she reflects she’s been fleeing the spotlight ever since her escape from Chet. A cryptic note reveals that Claire is being watched by someone who knows her horrifying past, someone who’s taunting her to be the first on the scene of subsequent tunnel murders. She quickly snags piecemeal work with the Portland Post and then a full-time job on the basis of pictures she’s snapped at the Four Alarm Brewery, which suddenly turn into pictures of possible suspects when the police find the body of a strip-club dancer in a tunnel beneath the pub hours later. Marissa, who’s taken the name Claire Lou, has decided to settle in the Oregon city that’s home to Jenessa and their two mothers. Neither Chet’s imprisonment nor the cash settlement they’d received restored them to normalcy, and they’ve all, in their different ways and largely isolated from each other, been living on the brink ever since. Eventually Rosemary and the three girls escaped, but not really. A few months later, another of his prisoners gave birth to Jenessa, and a third captive died four years later giving birth to Lily. Her mother, Rosemary, had been kidnapped and impregnated by Chet Granger, and she gave birth to Marissa in the basement where she was kept. Twenty years after escaping a hyperextended childhood trauma, a peripatetic photographer touches down in Portland to find even grimmer nightmares awaiting her.

Lies We Bury by Elle Marr