Lord Kelvin's Machine by James P. Blaylock

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. Superb characters and setting, in a plot that meshes seamlessly-the single cavil being that it goes on too long: we learn what's happening well before the characters do.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.

Ackroyd, meantime, has also heard the screams and has seen a black-clad woman and a child walking beneath the trees but he refuses to discuss key events-a tragic love affair, a brutal murder-that occurred 70 years before. Ackroyd, by putting dead rats in the old man's water tank. Meanwhile, developer Lance Klein is attempting to buy up the properties in the canyon, hoping to make a real-estate killing his agent is Barney Pomeroy, a dangerous blackmailer and obsessed voyeur who haunts Beth's dwelling and who tries to drive out another resident, Mr. Soon after a visit from his wife Amanda and son David, Peter discovers that they have disappeared two bodies, a woman's and a child are reported lying in a pool higher up the canyon where Peter lives-but the bodies also vanish. But he keeps seeing-or hallucinating-scenes from his marriage, and hearing a woman's screams far off in the night. Peter Travers is trying to put his failed marriage behind him and enter into a new relationship with girlfriend Beth. Fairly orthodox ghost story set in the California hill country, from the author of The Paper Grail, Lord Kelvin's Machine, etc.

Lord Kelvin's Machine by James P. Blaylock