Who doesn’t enjoy a good old fashion home invasion yarn with a big dose of cryptid fuckery? I’m ngl, few things in life are more beautiful than a pulse-pounding story about a monster in the basement and the roar of a chainsaw.

This paradox of horror is on full display in Trog, the latest novel by Zachary Ashford. Looking for kicks, three masked serial killers smash their way into a house in rural Australia. The homeowners do the best they can to defend themselves, but things escalate dramatically when a huge bigfoot-like creature escapes from a subterranean prison.

There are no bigfoot or yeti in Australia, but there is something called a yowie, an antipodean sasquatch-like beast with roots in Aboriginal mythology. Caged for decades in an underground cavern, the monster—named Trog by an old carny with a hankering to become the next P.T. Barnum—capitalizes on the the surrounding chaos to set himself free. 

According to Ashford, Trog is truly hideous. “His teeth, jagged and pointed and full of rot, drip with foaming saliva,” he writes. “His eyes are deeply intelligent, but it doesn’t take a genius to realize the monster is possessed with insane rage.” 

Throughout the book, the yowie is nigh unstoppable. And he’s pissed off too. The pesky humans have hurt him and he wants to pull their limbs from their bodies and smash their faces with his fist. One victim’s body snaps like dry spaghetti as the yowie rips her in half.

Trog is a monster, no doubt about it, but he isn’t evil like the trio of home invaders. Wearing zombie, skull and wolf masks (which define their personalities more or less), the gang roams Australia’s hinterlands killing people indiscriminately for fun. “This isn’t a political statement,” explains the brute wearing a wolf’s mask. “It’s entertainment.”

Wolf is by far the most dangerous member of the gang. He’s a large man who carries a sledgehammer resembling the kind of weapon a Norse god might use. Later, he picks up a chainsaw for further emphasis. Says Ashford: “Even if he wasn’t a psychotic home invader, everything about him screamed fuckwit—the howling, the over-the-top approach to the invasion. almost like he was trying to be a movie character and not a real person.”

As it turns out, Wolf is the lucky bastard who gets a one-on-one showdown with the yowie. It’s man-against-beast as the novel ends with both combatants getting a taste of their own brutality. It’s beautiful. 

[ Trog / By Zachary Ashford / First Printing: March 2025 / ISBN: 9781998763450 ]