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. Here's hoping that the next two in this trilogy will deliver more heart-racing, heart-rending prose.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. Roanhorse, the first Indigenous American to win a Nebula and a finalist for a Hugo, has given us a sharp, wonderfully dreamy, action-driven novel. Propelled by the Coyote god Ma’ii, Maggie confronts her past, her love, and her own power in a war where the stakes are higher than she ever imagined. As her quest grows, Maggie and Kai battle immortals and mortals alike, and Maggie ends up wondering whom to trust. In walks the troublingly sexy Kai, whom she reluctantly takes along to hunt monsters and who has medicine big enough to perhaps heal the Earth from the Big Water. Maggie has been left to hunt monsters alone, hoping for the return of the god she loved like a father and wanted as a lover. Little except Maggie, whose grandmother was murdered in front of her, who was abandoned by the god Neizghání, who’d saved her. A wall has been built to keep the Diné safe from what remains, but little can keep them safe from the monsters that have woken up inside those borders and the witches who work to destroy what life is left. In Roanhorse’s hard-hitting debut novel, most of the world has perished, and Dinétah (the Navajo Nation) has risen.

She’s going to need them on a journey culminating in the kind of battle fantasy readers will relish.

After the Big Water, Maggie Hoskie’s monster-slaying clan powers have woken up.

Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse