Synopsis
When a college drop-out accepts work on a cannabis farm in the woods of Northern California, he realizes almost immediately that the harsh realities of this life won’t match his naïve fantasies. He’ll have to work hard-and watch his back. Dubbed “Harmless” by his cultish cohorts, the young man learns the logistics of cultivation and the dark philosophies dictating conduct in this outlaw wilderness.
The farm sits on a mountain the locals call Satan’s Tumor, above a valley called The Green Cauldron, where dangerous elements have been brewing beneath the misty canopy. Overstimulated gangs of smugglers and well-funded foreign mobsters vie for control of this fertile territory, threatening to disrupt an elaborate ecosystem that predates history.
And beneath it all, in the most dismal corners of The Green Cauldron, even darker forces are stirring… angry, agitated, pushed to the brink. The forest is an explosive tinderbox on the verge of ignition. If he’s going to survive, Harmless must sink to new depths before facing unimaginable horrors on a feverish journey into Hell and back.
Dopefoot is a distinctly Californian spin on dark woodland horror, a gory cryptid mystery fueled by butane, THC, and amphetamines, by Joshua Millican, author of Teleportasm and Chopping Mall: The Novelization.
Review
When is a Bigfoot horror book not about Bigfoot at all? That’s the question some readers might be asking themselves as they tear through Joshua Millican’s Dopefoot.
I went into Dopefoot rather blindly, knowing only that the premise involved one of the world’s most well-known and heavily sought after cryptids and a California marijuana farm. I was expecting something along the lines of a Hunter Shea book by way of Cheech and Chong, or maybe a spiritual successor to Cocaine Bear that could be distilled down to Bong Hit Bigfoot. Dopefoot proved to be much more, but also less, than that.
I suppose I must also issue a slight spoiler warning, albeit one that’s drilled into our main character’s head early-on and that readers should keep in mind here: Bigfoot isn’t real. But that doesn’t mean the forests of Northern Cali surrounding the dope fields at Goat Farms are safe. Far from it. These woods are haunted by warring factions of pot growers and thieves, along with a few of the more inexplicable elements. Some are used by the farmers to prop up the legs of urban legends surrounding Satanic cults, while are others are less easily explained or accounted for.
Dopefoot has its fair share of monsters, but Millican focuses on those human evils first and foremost. When we meet Harmless, a college drop-out hitching across the country to avoid going home and facing his mother’s wrath, he’s studying the various posters of missing people. Some blame Bigfoot for the disappearances, while others claim they’ve been sacrificed by the cults inhabiting the forests. It’s more likely that the missing hikers stumbled across an illicit growing operation and found themselves murdered or conscripted into farming the fields at gunpoint before being dumped in a mass grave.
Millican’s focus on weed farming and the growers Harmless finds himself equally enraptured with and ensnared by is deadly serious business. Unlike a Shea or Jeff Strand book, which would take the combination of pot growers and Bigfoot and let it run wild with raucous fun, Dopefoot plays it entirely straight, whittling down those blurry lines separating crime and horror genres. Harmless’s journey through The Green Cauldron, as these woods are known, is more like a trip through Dante’s Inferno, eventually culminating into something more akin to Apocalypse Now than Zombie Bigfoot, as Harmless descends ever deeper into madness and war. And war, as we all know, is hell.
Along the way, Millican builds a rich mythology around The Green Cauldron. The idea of Bigfoot is never far behind, but the truth (or truths) is oftentimes nebulous and darker. This makes Dopefoot more about the concept of how urban legends are built and grow (or are farmed) across generations to take on a life of their own, mixing fact and fiction and using lies and conspiracy to hide the truth. Dopefoot is a grander, deeper exploration of its illegal, backwoods pot growers than it is about Bigfoot, and ultimately a more rewarding and thoughtful journey than if it had just been about the cryptid alone.
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