Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S.
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. One giant step beyond Bela.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. A vampire bonanza in appropriate dark, humid, spider-web narrative-Rice's specialty. But worry not: vampire rules dictate that mortals are perfectly safe in Vampire Bars. Rice dots Lestat's tale with some marvelous chillers: a giant killer-god on the march a splendid crypt entrance before a terrified congregation night prowls and rock-concert screams with telltale "tiny white faces" in the San Francisco audience. It's rooted in Earth Mother cults and took on the coloration of various periods and places-hence the sectarian battling of demonic immortals. Lestat will learn of the vampires' complex history.
and Marius, keeper of ancient Egyptian gods and vampirian annals.
She'll join him in a sectarian battle with Vampire Armand's cemetery gang, who've captured Nicholas (Lestate rescues him but later can't resist merging circulatory systems).
To save his beloved mother from an imminent death, there's that blood-for-blood ceremony, and zingo! Mother becomes the luscious "Gabrielle," charter coven member. All, the "taste and feel of blood when all passion and greed is sharpened in that one desire!" But Lestat as vampire is in trouble almost immediately with the vampire establishment, since he loves living as a mortal and wants to do good. The seventh son of an impecunious French nobleman, Lestat, the family hunter and wolf-killer, who with his soul-mate Nicholas, another rebel, pondered the "meaninglessness" of the universe, was initiated into the Dark Gifts of the vampire in Paris. Rice's formidable Lestat (given a bad press by his protege Louis in the author's Interview With a Vampire, 1976) sets the record straight with his story-from 18th-century fang-y to 20th-century rock star-all in Rice's faintly erotic, red-velvet-tasseled prose, festooned with swags of philosophical-theological expository flights, intra-vampirian warfare and sanguinary nightcaps.