Editor Jim Beard wants readers to know something about his new short story collection titled Knocks and Howls. “This book isn’t about Bigfoot,” he writes in the introduction. “It’s about the idea of Bigfoot.”

Oh sure, you’ll find one or two rampaging apemen in this volume, but Beard is true to his word: his anthology takes Bigfoot to the nth degree. Each writer tackles the legend of Bigfoot as it intersects with the real world. 

The first story expresses this theme with a bit of poetry. “Regions of Fancy” by Josh Reynolds features a conversation between Daniel Boone and John Audubon back in 1810. The two folk heroes chat amicably until Boone makes a startling admission. He tells Audubon that he had a fatal confrontation with Bigfoot in the woods of Kentucky. And more startling, he still carried the beast’s skull in his rucksack. 

Taking a look at the skull, Audubon notices right away that it did not lack for ferocity. “It was a thing of utter strangeness that set the world off its axis,” he later wrote in his journal. “I could feel the weight of an inhuman tread in my mind. What thing was this, that the Creator had set loose upon the land?”

Similarly, two stoner kids take a trip through the woods to find God in Christopher Ryan’s story “Legacy.” What they find instead is Bigfoot tripping on mushrooms and experiencing his own intimate religious enlightenment. 

“Legacy” is unabashedly a stoner buddy adventure similar to Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke and Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. It’s funny, I admit, but it’s not the wackiest thing in this collection. That honor goes to “Suicide Squatch” by Eric M. Esquivel. 

Esquivel’s story is about a suicidal sad sack named Richard Franzblau. His intention is to kill himself amid the majestic splendor of Washington’s Gifford Pinchot National Forest. 

Richard’s plans go pear-shaped, however, when he comes face-to-face with a hostile nine-foot-tall Bigfoot. He’s not afraid to die, but he doesn’t want to be torn limb from limb by a cryptid monster. Immediately, his survival instincts kick in. 

Richard somehow survives his tussle with Bigfoot but he’s thrown in jail for unauthorized first-contact with a non-human intelligence. Because of his unique experience, he’s then recruited by an organization called C.L.I.C.K. (short for Cryptid Location, Intervention, Capturing and Killing) and immediately dispatched to Colorado, to negotiate peace talks between warring Sasquatch tribes. 

Another comedic tale is “Like and Subscribe” by Mary Fan. Three video podcasters travel to the Pine Barrens of New Jersey to confirm the existence of Bigfoot. After a series of stunts and petty bickering, the rivals reach an amicable truce. Fan’s characters are sweet and adorable and I encourage her to revisit her story and expand it into a novel-length adventure. 

The final story in Knocks and Howls is by editor Beard himself. It is literally “The Last Bigfoot Story.” Acting as good neighbors, an alien race comes to Earth to solve all of mankind’s ills—cancer, dementia, Covid-19 and all the rest.

Unfortunately, these aliens are excessively logical and cannot abide by anything enigmatic. There’s no place for religions, myths and folktales … and that spells doom for the legend of Bigfoot. 

[ Knocks and Howls / Edited by Jim Beard / First Printing: February 2024 / ISBN: 9798878739085 ]