Blake was just a small child when he saw his first bigfoot. Standing in the middle of a deserted highway at night, the beast towered well over eight feet. Its body was bent at an unnatural angle, as if its bones had been torn apart and reassembled incorrectly.

Its face was human, but not exactly. The structure suggested a man’s features, yet everything was slightly distorted and stretched over a skull that didn’t quite fit. Its mouth hung slightly open, revealing teeth that looked more suited for tearing flesh than chewing food.

The beast watched Blake and his family pass, its gaze following their car with an unsettling intensity. Even as a young boy, Blake felt like he was trespassing on territory the creature considered its own.

For the next 20 years, Blake lived with the memory of that profound moment. “I’ve spent my entire life afraid of something no one else believes in,” he told his wife. He swore to himself that he would avoid the nearby woods where bigfoot called home.

But Blake couldn’t escape the contrived narrative of genre fiction forever. He and his wife Jessica (along with their friends Kyle and Norah) make the ill-fated decision to spend a long weekend hiking and camping in a national park lousy with apemen.

Once in the wilderness, the foursome are relentlessly harassed by a handful of cryptid beasts. If you’re reading with your eyes wide open, you’ll be able to predict how Chris Levine’s novel ends pretty easily. The signposting was overt.

That’s okay with me, however; atmosphere was all that mattered here. Tone and color. Vibe over verisimilitude. The ensuing bigfoot violence was just an articulation of nature’s indifference to humanity.

For example, when the apemen finally attacked, the forest gave no sign that it cared one way or another. A nearby river flowed leisurely through the trees; its calmness seemed cruel as wind stirred the branches above, carrying the tang of blood.

Near the end of the novel, Blake’s wife was captured and taken to a mountain cavern. This was the first time she was able to see the creatures clearly. Despite their grotesque semblance to humanity, she saw intelligence and deliberate purpose in their eyes. Standing above her, the monolithic figures inhaled her scent and dissected her with their gaze. She knew immediately that what they wanted from her was worse than death.

[ Cryptid / By Chris Levine / First Printing: October 2026 / ISBN: 9798905040474 ]