It’s been a slow reading week. The onset of Autumn (think “season of damp dullness not Keats’ “Season of mellow fruitfulness”) has been accompanied by a head cold just bad enough to take the edge off my day but not bad enough for me to retire to bed and declare myself ill. Fortunately, my second book of the week was a solid five-star read, so even though the content was stark, it lifted my spirits. 

Anyway, here’s what’s happened this week and what’s up next

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This week, I read a novel about people looking for Bigfoot that I thought would be a comic thriller but which turned out to be about nice people considering the nature of belief and human connection; and a novel that I bought as a riff on Red Riding Hood, but which turned out to be an excellent post-apolyptic survival story.

Every month at St. Pete’s Tavern in rugged western Montana, a meeting is convened by the Basic Bigfoot Society’s members—both of them. Jute and Vergil are lifelong friends, bound by an affinity for the elusive North American Wood Ape. Their monthly meetings and annual expeditions are a tradition that keep their friendship alive when so much else about their small town has fallen away.

But things are about to get exciting for the Basic Bigfoot Society. Dr. Marcus Bernard, the country’s foremost Bigfoot “expert,” approaches them with a proposition that seems almost too good to be true: to join their next expedition, along with an ambitious young documentarian, Vicky Xu. Thankfully, Vergil’s daughter Rye is home from college, and decides to tag along in order to make sure her dad and Jute aren’t made fools of. Once in the woods, strange things begin to happen to them that seem to defy rational explanation. Is this a hoax? Or are they on the precipice of the greatest anthropological discovery ever?

This is how ‘American Mythology‘ was marketed:

“A charming and comic debut novel about a quirky ensemble embarking on an epic quest to find Bigfoot.”

“American Mythology is a riveting, big-hearted novel about a group of pilgrims who encounter both the mysteries of nature and ultimately those of the human heart. Giano Cromley has given us a much-needed reminder that, if sought, wonder may yet be found in our world.”—Ron Rash, author of The Caretaker“

Reading this, I expected an eccentric comic adventure story about the search for Bigfoot. What I got was something much gentler, more sentimental and more reflective than that. 

The story is told in a slow, pull up a chair on the porch, get yourself situated and sit awhile style that I found quite relaxing. It’s the kind of style that signals to the reader that they need to listen for the lesson in the story and not just the plot; that things are going to move slowly, but that’s OK because good things take a while.

This is a story about four nice people and one person who, over time, has become someone who is no longer nice, searching for Bigfoot. Not a metaphorical Bigfoot, an actual Bigfoot that one member of the party has a traumatic childhood memory of almost encountering in the mountains of Montana. It’s also a story about the nature of belief: how it differs from knowledge and how it has the power to illuminate the imagination and make the world a more magical place. I thought the approach to belief was signalled early in the book when the two members of the Basic Big Foot Society were considering the peculiar stained glass window in the only bar in Basic, Montana:

“No one left alive in Basic today could verify the window’s origin though. Like all myths, this one became history the moment enough people chose to believe it.”

t’s a story about how you build your identity. It considers how small towns conspire unconsciously to prevent you from becoming someone different from the person you were in school, how friendships and family relationships can help or hinder us in becoming who we are meant to be.. It reflects on how who we are can be shaped by having a purpose, a passion to pursue, especially if there is someone to share the passion/purpose with.

It has a broadly quest-based plot, seeded with magical elements, set against spectacular natural beauty and with occasional moments of tension that put the main characters at risk.

Fundamentally, this is a nice book, full of uplifting ideas and relationships. Sadly, I’m not as nice as the book and there were times when I grew a little bored with it. Perhaps it was the meandering pace but I think it was mostly just too wholesome for me.

It’s not safe for anyone alone in the woods. There are predators that come out at night: critters and coyotes, snakes and wolves. But the woman in the red jacket has no choice. Not since the Crisis came, decimated the population, and sent those who survived fleeing into quarantine camps that serve as breeding grounds for death, destruction, and disease. She is just a woman trying not to get killed in a world that doesn’t look anything like the one she grew up in, the one that was perfectly sane and normal and boring until three months ago.

There are worse threats in the woods than the things that stalk their prey at night. Sometimes, there are men. Men with dark desires, weak wills, and evil intents. Men in uniform with classified information, deadly secrets, and unforgiving orders. And sometimes, just sometimes, there’s something worse than all of the horrible people and vicious beasts combined. 

Red doesn’t like to think of herself as a killer, but she isn’t about to let herself get eaten up just because she is a woman alone in the woods….

I hadn’t planned to read ‘The Girl In Red’ this week. I came across it in a GoodReads post on “Ten Years of Horror Hits to Read This October”. I listened to the audiobook sample and knew both that is was a good fit for the A Grim Tale Halloween Bingo square and that I wanted to listen to the rest of the story as soon as possible. So I bought the book and dived in.

It was immediately immersive. Christina Henry demonstrated a masterful use of a first-person narrative. Everything was told from Red’s point of view. Given that there was a whole post-apocalyptic world to build, and that much of the time, Red was alone, this was a remarkable achievement. I loved being inside Red’s head, hearing her debate with herself and reprimand or encourage herself. 

The story is stark and bloody. The opening sequence is violent and fatal. The story takes place in a world that offers no quarter to a lone woman trying to make her way more than a hundred miles across country to her grandmother’s house. Red does some terrible, violent things, and yet, she remains someone I rooted for and wanted to succeed. 

The story is told in two timelines: Now and Before. We first meet Red in the Now timeline. She is alone and she is formidable. The story then cuts to Before, showing Red living with her family as the catastrophe that will end the world as they’ve known it is unfolding. The Before sections gave Red a context that made her both more human and more impressive. She’s not a superhero. Not even a hero in her own eyes. But she’s not going to let anyone stop her from getting to her grandma’s house. The Now sections were tense and full of risk, but the Before sections were just as propulsive, as I wanted to know how Red, who had been planning to travel with her parents and her older brother, ended up being alone.

This was one of the best post-apocalyptic stories I’ve read. It was made even better by January Levoy’s narration.

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I’d only intened to buy one book this week, the new DI Adams novel, but then I browsed the Audible Two-Titles-For-One-Credit sale and two more books got added to my TBR pile.

“I don’t fear death . . . but they do.”
Muriel McAuley has lived in the Scottish fishing village of Witchaven all her life. She was born there, and she intends to die there.
But when an overseas property developer threatens to evict the residents from their homes and raze Witchaven to the ground in the name of progress, all seems lost . . . until the day a mysterious fog bank creeps inland.
THE HAAR
To some it brings redemption . . . to others, it brings only madness and death. What macabre secrets lie within . . .

I liked the setting, the plot summary and the narrator but what sold me on the story were the opening lines:

“Muriel Margaret McAuley was eight-four years old the first time she saw a man turned inside-out by a sea monster. You might think this would bother a woman of her age, but, as Muriel was fond of saying, she has seen a lot in her eighty-four short years.”

There’s more than one way to get to Faery. It’s getting back that’s the problem…
DI Adams is not having a good summer. Her house has been hexed. Her DCI’s muttering about mental health breaks. Her invisible dog keeps disappearing at inopportune moments. And to top it all off, her parents have just turned up, determined to experience all Yorkshire has to offer. 
And they’re going to get more than they bargained for, because someone else has turned up too. 
He calls himself Velmyr Duskthorn, Lord of the Fae, and he’s demanding a powerful book Adams doesn’t have, can’t get, and couldn’t hand over anyway – unless she fancies starting an inter-species war. 
But when her parents go missing, the whole game changes. 
Now Adams is racing against rogue portals, dangerous sheep, and trigger-happy farmers, plus the closing net of her own colleagues. Her allies are thinning out fast, but she still has her duck, her Dandy, and one very large stick. And this is her family.
So if Faery wants to fight? Come on and give it a go …

The publication of another DI Adams book is a cause for celebration so I’ve pre-ordered this one. It will be on my shelved on 23rd October.

Officer Ren Hopper is an enforcement ranger with the National Park Service, tasked with duties both mundane and thrilling: Breaking up fights at campgrounds, saving clueless tourists from moose attacks, and attempting to broker an uneasy peace between the wealthy vacationers who tromp through the park with cameras, and the residents of hardscrabble Cooke City who want to carve out a meaningful living.

When Ren, hiking through the backcountry on his day off, encounters a tall man with a dog and a gun chasing a small black bear up a hill, his hackles are raised. But what begins as an investigation into the background of a local poacher soon opens into something far murkier: A shattered windshield, a series of red ribbons tied to traps, the discovery of a frightening conspiracy, and a story of heroism gone awry.

‘The Last Ranger‘ was the book I picked up for free in the Audible sale (counting ‘The Haar‘ as the purchase). I decided to give it a try because I’m on a roll with Park Ranger books at the moment and because ‘The Guide‘, the last Peter Heller book I read, was really good except for the ending and a miscast narrator. I’m hoping this one will be good all the way through.

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The two books on my reading list for next week couldn’t be more different. One is a light-hearted book about zombies told from the perspective of a talking cat and written by an author I always enjoy, the other is an epic story of ideas about technology and the end of the world as we know it, written by an author who is new to me.

“Zombies don’t exist. You told me they don’t exist.”
“There’s a corpse clawing its way out of a grave over there. I’m open to the possibility that I may have been wrong.”

The dead are rising. They’re even on Facebook.
If we don’t stop this fast, we’ll be knee-deep in zombies before you can say mmm, brains.
The problem? We don’t know who started it, why it’s happening, or how to stop it.
But G & C London, Private Investigators, are on the case — right after we handle disapproving reapers, cranky magicians, zombie-fied chickens, and a small case of personal undeadness.

Trust us.

I read ‘Gobbelino London & a Scourge of Pleasantries‘, the first book in this series, last year. It was fun but it didn’t grab me in the way the other Kim Watt series have. I think that may have been down to the Lovecraftian tentacles. I’m hoping the zombies will be more fun.

Lai Zhen is about to die. As an Internet-famous survivalist, she’s spent her life prepping for the end of the world. But now, desperate and cornered in a mall in Singapore, she’s mad she might go out not knowing what the hell is going on. If she makes it out alive, what kind of a future will be waiting for her?

Across the world, Martha Einkorn works the room at a gathering of mega-rich companies hell-bent securing a future just for them. Covert weapons, private weather, technological prophecy, when Martha fled her father’s compound she may have left the cult behind, but if the apocalyptic warnings of his fox and rabbit sermon are starting to come true, how much future is actually left?

Martha and Zhen’s worlds are about to collide. While a few billionaires assured of their own safety lead the world to destruction, Martha’s relentless drive and Zhen’s insatiable curiosity could lead to something beautiful … or the cataclysmic end of civilization.

I picked this up because Big Tech billionaires have been a bête noir of mine for a long time. I speint most of my career working with these companies and I became very familiar with the Silicon Valley disrupt-to-make-money-because-we’re-smarter-than-them mindset. I’m hoping Naomi Alderman will give me the satisfaction of seeing them eviscerated, a least in fiction.

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No more bingos yet but I’m still having more squares called than my reading speed can keep up with.

Anyway, here’s the status of my card:

Reading: 4, Called: 14, Read: 14, Read and Called: 10, Bingo: 1.