60 pages • 2-hour read
Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, graphic violence, animal cruelty and death, and cursing.
Resilience as a Catalyst for Personal Growth
Survival stories are often stories of resilience. This is especially true in the case of Devolution, as Greenloop residents not only face the threat of isolation from the outside world, but also the looming threat of the Bigfoots that endanger their community. Through the character arcs of the novel’s protagonist (Kate), her husband (Dan), and their mentor (Mostar), Brooks shows how resilience can be transformative, allowing people to overcome challenges they thought were impossible to face.
At the start of the novel, Kate is overdependent on others. The journal format of her account is directly linked to the work she’s doing in therapy, as is apparent because her early journal entries frequently address her therapist. Dan is similarly passive, and extreme listlessness initially defines his behavior, as he’s unable to recover from the failure of his career. Kate refers to herself and Dan as “[t]wo betas” in Chapter 4, which puts them at odds with the novel’s lead antagonist, whom Kate names Alpha. Kate and Dan react passively to the events around them, looking to the Durants for an easy fix to their predicament after the Rainier eruption.
Mostar inspires the Hollands to rely on themselves when the Durants’ faith in outside help proves too abstract, given their isolation. Unlike the Hollands, Mostar quickly adapts to the new circumstances, presenting a concrete plan to help them cope. The novel gradually reveals that Mostar had to develop extreme resilience and survival skills in her past, during the siege of her hometown, Mostar, during the Bosnian War in the 1990s. Her artist statement in Chapter 24 gives insight into how her traumatic experiences shaped her life: “We can’t just mourn the deaths, we also have to celebrate the lives. We need Anne Frank’s diary, but we also need her smile on the cover” (253). Mostar draws strength from the hints of happiness that people manage to recover in times of adversity, and her adaptive behavior inspires the Hollands to achieve their own validation and growth through troubling times.
Mostar’s leadership helps Dan overcome his lethargy by helping him find value in his efforts. She teaches him to be resilient, not only to their situation, but to the failure of reaching his past career goals. By learning an entirely new skillset, Dan discovers his value to the community and affirms that he’s more than his past failures. Similarly, Kate grows from her self-perception as a beta into a community leader. A key moment that signals Kate’s growth comes in Chapter 19 when the success of her garden motivates her neighbors to offer their supplies, expanding Kate’s project into a community garden. From that moment on, she no longer thinks about what her therapist would want for her, instead focusing on what she can do to improve the quality of life in Greenloop. This becomes essential when Mostar’s death galvanizes Kate into leading the defense in the final chapter. The character dynamics between Mostar and the Hollands show how resilience can lead to personal growth.
The Folly of Human Ambition
Brooks’s novel can be read as a cautionary tale against the folly of human ambition. It criticizes the hubris of believing that humans can domesticate any piece of land, no matter how hostile its features are, to serve their goals. Underlying this assertion is the assumption that human intelligence entitles humanity to dominion over the natural world. In truth, survival of the fittest remains the eminent principle of life in the wilderness.
The inherent flaw of Greenloop is that it claims to be fully independent from human society when the opposite is true. Greenloop’s system of comfortable sustainability collapses once the Rainier eruption occurs because it destroys their link to the conveniences of urban life. Tony’s only reassurance against the flaws of the Greenloop system is that emergency services can cater to their urgent needs. However, Tony’s thinking represents the “move fast and break things” (63) approach that Frank identifies as being typical of tech industry leaders. Those who have access to technology and capital think only in terms of progressive iteration, ignoring the bigger issues that each of those decisions implies. Tony leaves those issues for other people to resolve, underscoring his reliance on other people and systems to survive. This is wholly incompatible with the “survival of the fittest” principle.
Reality starts to set in for the Greenloop residents only when a mountain lion marks the first intrusion of nature into their community. Yvette’s assertion that the cougar meant no harm validates Schell’s critique that people tend to anthropomorphize animals and project human thinking onto them; in addition, Yvette’s assertion is an attempt to assert the authority of her and Tony’s belief system over the community. Though this attempt proves unsuccessful, the other Greenloop residents are slow to fully shake off their convenience-driven mindset, as is evident in Vincent’s misguided attempts to communicate with the Sasquatch troop, believing that he can articulate a mutual desire for coexistence. It’s easy to draw a link between Vincent’s response and the first bombardment that immediately follows it. From that moment on, the Greenloop residents become disillusioned with their collective denial, accepting the challenge that they must fight to assert a high position in the food chain.
The novel concludes with Greenloop’s destruction, which signals an abandonment of the convenience-based lifestyle that the Durants tried to champion by establishing the community. Though one could argue that Tony had good intentions in trying to marry convenience and sustainability, he failed to consider what it meant to place that kind of lifestyle in a setting where hostility determines survival. Hence, his ambition prevented him from establishing crucial safeguards against their hostile surroundings and resulted in his downfall.
How Extreme Circumstances Can Provoke Latent Violence
The novel initially frames the Bigfoots as antagonists who lack any empathy. In Chapter 16, Schell uses the word “bloodlust” to describe the violence that chimpanzees show toward their prey, which preempts the depiction of the feeding frenzy the Bigfoots engage in when they mutilate and eat Yvette’s corpse in Chapter 22. While this helps emphasize their status as the novel’s antagonists, it also foreshadows a parallel development within Kate as she ascends to leadership of the Greenloop community. Specifically, Kate’s desire to protect her community and seek vengeance for Mostar’s death drives her own “devolution,” activating base instincts that lead her to lose her sense of humanity.
Frank initially uses the term “devolution” in Chapter 11 to describe the aggressive behavior the Bigfoots showed when they discovered Greenloop. Instinctively remembering their ancestors’ conflict with the early human beings during the Ice Age, the Bigfoots “devolved” into aggressors, putting them in conflict with Kate and her neighbors. The Greenloop residents are driven to defend themselves and fight for survival, but when Kate perceives the desecration of her garden as an insult to her efforts, she begins to enact her own devolution.
The novel establishes the impossibility of communication between the Greenloop residents and the Bigfoots. Kate even articulates this impossibility after she discovers excrement in her garden: “Fuck you, Little Prey. Here’s what I can do to your nest” (248). However, this message is merely a projection, the result of Kate’s attempts to anthropomorphize the Bigfoots and rationalize her anger. The result of this interpretation is Kate’s resolution to eradicate the Bigfoots, an extreme response to a particularly devastating attack on her community.
While the novel doesn’t seek to account for the Bigfoots’ true intentions apart from survival, it provides space to interpret Kate’s intentions. She uses the desecration of Consort’s corpse as a deliberate strategy to provoke the Bigfoots into anger, correctly assuming that mutilating the Bigfoot’s corpse will stir strong emotions in her enemy because she knows that she would feel the same way in their position. Kate doesn’t stop there: The heat of battle causes her to mutilate Gray’s corpse after he’s killed. In this case, Kate’s submission to violence directly results in her neighbors’ deaths, and she describes her violent spell as the mistake that destabilized their defense.
Although the novel’s end keeps Kate’s fate ambiguous, Frank suggests that she has transformed into an invasive species in the woods, thriving on the suffering of the Bigfoots she finds around Rainier. Kate, too, has devolved by prioritizing violence and vindication over the defense of her community.
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