Summary
The truth is out there… and it will eat your face.
“Bigfoot is real.”
That’s what Sarah’s father told her before his academic disgrace and untimely death. Now, primatologist Dr. Sarah Bishop is eager to restore her father’s good name. Survival show host Russ Cloud is just as eager to boost his plummeting ratings. They’ll both have a shot at redemption when they find themselves hired by eccentric billionaire Cameron Carson.
After a series of his publicity stunts end in spectacular failure, Carson has a plan to redeem his tarnished image: capture a live Sasquatch. Sarah and Russ join an expedition with an eclectic crew: an Afrikaner safari hunter, a washed up pro wrestling star, a Shoshone master tracker full of surprises, a heavily tattooed Russian warrior woman, a pair of wise-cracking nerds, and a cute gum-chewing intern with some hidden skills. Will they find Bigfoot? There’s something in the woods… but it’s not what they’re expecting.
Review
Certain names immediately spring to mind when you think of classic literature. William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Leo Tolstoy, Ernest Hemingway. Add to this canon Nick Sullivan, with his estimable literary debut, Zombie Bigfoot.
OK, maybe — just maybe — Zombie Bigfoot isn’t quite on par with Romeo & Juliet or Crime & Punishment, or any other half-dozen works forming the concrete backbone of any self-respecting English Lit program, but it sure is a hell of a lot of fun. Besides that, Sullivan’s creature feature is clearly inspired by a number of other foundational artworks, like Jurassic Park, Planet of the Apes, and at least a few King Kong flicks, with or without the honorific, and that gives Sullivan an edge over the so-called greats in my book.
As the title indicates, the premise here is pretty straightforward and Sullivan delightfully delivers exactly what’s promised. Russ Cloud is a reality-TV survivalist star in search of a ratings boost. He’s joined by Dr. Sarah Bishop on an expedition in search of Bigfoot, a high-tech, backwoods trek funded by Musk-like (and Musk-lite) billionaire, Cameron Carson. Bishop has a personal stake in finding Bigfoot, as her disgraced, and now deceased, father claims to have made contact with one during a previous hiking incident that left him injured and on the brink of death. Was it all an elaborate hoax he concocted, or a truth that was derided as lunacy? She believes her father and aims to earn him the posthumous legacy he deserves.
Simply hiking through the woods to find Bigfoot isn’t quite good enough for Sullivan, though. It’s a story that’s been done to death elsewhere, and Sullivan smartly ups the ante by bringing in another horror staple and mashing them up together to create a new breed of monster. It’s not just Bigfoot and people crowding these here woods — there’s zombies, too, and when one of them latches onto a violent, mean-spirited alpha Bigfoot, woo boy, it’s off to the races toot sweet!
I’m usually not a fan of anthropomorphizing animals, or making animals central point-of-view narrative figures, but I guess if you’re going to do it Bigfoot is a fairly reasonable species to get away with it. In fact, I was surprised at how much I actually enjoyed Sullivan’s Bigfoot POV chapters, mostly from the lead BF, Brighteyes, who has a particular fascination and affectation for humans. We also get a few segments as seen through the eyes of zombified Bigfoot to help drive home the distinguishing characteristics between what might reasonably be viewed, respectively, as the missing link and an altogether broken link.
Sullivan puts a lot of work into humanizing his Bigfoot characters, and it pays off pretty damn well. The human characters are of mostly familiar stock but are at least entertaining in their interactions and enjoy the gift of gab. I think Sullivan knows we’re really here for the zombie monsters, though, and he smartly focuses on the action, which is gnarly, gory, over the top, and almost non-stop chompy-chomp save for the momentary, and necessary, pauses to allow would-be victims to catch their breath for a moment and deliver some exposition to flesh things out. I also appreciated Sullivan’s take on billionaire Carson, an eccentric who has begun to use “his vast wealth to fund several high-profile stunts that had all ended in epic failures.” It’s a pretty clear, and highly welcome!, jab at Musk, but with Zombie Bigfoot having debuted in 2016 we can only be grateful that Carson is off fucking about in the woods with zombie Bigfoot instead of dismantling the government, disrupting Social Security, and destroying cancer research with a gaggle of teenage coders. Then again, there is a just-released sequel to consider, so… we shall see.
The most welcome aspect of Zombie Bigfoot, though, is its offering of escapist entertainment in a time when it’s sorely, desperately needed. It likely won’t be the subject of any aspiring doctoral lit students’ thesis, but I’d rather it be a fun, gory spectacle anyway, one that can help take my mind and attention away from the massive burning trash fire that is America circa 2025. Sullivan delivers that in spades, along with a promise of more to come. Zombie Bigfoot is a joyous B-movie-inspired creature feature, perfect for fans of Hunter Shea and Chris Sorensen, and you can bet your ass I’ll be reading the follow-up next. Now, onward to Zombie Billionaire! I can’t wait to see what’s in store for us there!
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