The novel tells the story of conflict-averse Kate Holland, a corporate yuppie who moves with her unemployed husband Dan to Greenloop, a technologically advanced "green" settlement deep in the Cascade Mountains. However, Kate and Dan have only been there for a matter of days when Mount Rainier erupts, trapping the inhabitants in Greenloop and severing all Internet connections. And then they find large footprints around the ground, suggesting that a large, mysterious creature might be watching them. And hunting them.
The book contains examples of:
- 20 Minutes into the Future: The story appears to be set a few years ahead of its publication date, based on the presence of things like delivery drones and driverless vans, neither of which have gotten off the ground as of 2020, as well as references to the US being embroiled in a war in Venezuela.
- Aborted Arc: There are some pretty heavy implications early in the book that Carmen is at least emotionally abusive to her wife, as Effie is cripplingly shy while Carmen always gets her own way and talks over Effie constantly, with some lighter inferences about physical abuse. This is quickly forgotten (though largely because it turns out that everyone ends up having much bigger fish to fry).
- Action Survivor: Pretty much the entire settlement of Greenloop after the Sasquatches attack, aside from Dr. Reinhardt and Tony and Yvette. Special mention goes to Mostar, who survived the Croat-Bosniak War of 1993-94
and uses the skills she learned in that conflict to great effect. - All for Nothing: After Kate and Mostar (and eventually the rest of the community) have invested a great deal of effort into starting a garden so that they can use its produce to survive the winter, it's unceremoniously trampled into muck by the alpha Sasquatch.
- Always a Bigger Fish: Several days after the eruption, a hungry mountain lion enters Greenloop and nearly kills Palomino, only for Mostar to chase it off with a homemade spear. That night, Kate hears the sounds of the mountain lion running afoul of one of the Sasquatches, which kills and eats the unfortunate feline with little trouble.
- Ambiguous Ending: Katie's journal ends after recounting the Final Battle with the Sasquatches, and she and Palomino were gone by the time a rescue team found the ruins of Greenloop. As such, there's no concrete evidence about what happened to them, leading to in-universe speculation and multiple theories about their fates, none of which are confirmed.
- Archaic Weapon for an Advanced Age: No one in Greenloop owns a gun. When they come under attack by the Sasquatches, they resort to making spears, axes, and shortswords out of kitchen knives and bamboo stalks, and use punji stakes and broken glass to create a defensive perimeter.
- An Arm and a Leg: After the Sasquatches capture Vincent, they slowly dismember him in an effort to draw the rest of the Greenloop inhabitants out. Kate spies one of them waving his severed arm at them from atop a ridge.
- The Apocalypse Brings Out the Best in People: Played straight with everyone except Yvette and Tony (Tony is also somewhat exempted from this because he completely loses his mind) and Reinhardt, and even he manages to Face Death with Dignity. Also played straightest with Dan, who is an inattentive husband and a Lazy Bum, then slots perfectly into the post-eruption landscape, becoming the most useful member of the settlement after Mostar.
- Apocalypse How: Class 0, Regional Societal Disruption. Based on the article snippets and interviews laced throughout the novel, it's apparent that the Rainier eruption devastated northwestern Washington and triggered massive societal upheavals throughout the state. Several cities, including Puyallup and Tacoma, suffered catastrophic damage, and thousands of people were killed by mudslides or died of exposure after trying to walk to safety. Seattle was overwhelmed by rioters, a sniper went off his meds and began killing people along the I-90 corridor, the media was spreading panic, and conspiracy theorists were having a field day.
- Apocalyptic Log: Kate's diary entries form the main body of the novel, and serve to chart Greenloop's fall from a high-tech "village of the future" to a devastated, burnt-out wreck.
- Author Tract: Max Brooks elaborates even more on the theme from World War Z of modern people as soft and unprepared for great humanitarian crisis, especially that which forces them to live off nature and/or without modern conveniences. Just in case you were thinking that soft skills might have some place in Greenloop.
- Beauty Is Bad: Kate describes Tony and Yvette as incredibly gorgeous and goes into a great deal of detail about why. But they are revealed to be the most shallow, useless members of the group.
- Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: These are the creatures that find the camp after being displaced by the eruption, or
because they're no longer scared of humans. - Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Yvette initially presents herself as a kind and caring Team Mom to the rest of Greenloop. Beneath the facade, she's a passive-aggressive Control Freak and Obnoxious Entitled Housewife who tries to bully Mostar into obeying her.
- Brains Evil, Brawn Good: "Evil" might be overstating it, but Dr Reinhardt, an intellectual philosopher, is a spoiled know-it-all and Straw Misogynist who gets everything wrong and hides food from the others, and the therapist Carmen is clueless, while the most useful and heroic characters are the strong, active ones who can build and hunt, like Dan, Mostar, and Kate.
- Bury Your Gays: Averted. Carmen and Effie both die in the final fight with the Sasquatches, but they are among the last characters to die and they aren't killed simply for being lesbians.
- Censored Child Death: The book ends with Kate and Palomino, the child, alone in the ruins of Greenloop, and they eventually leave. Frank notes that it's most likely they starved or froze while trying to leave and simply couldn't make it without a map. But Frank still says he hopes that Kate and Palomino are out there killing Sasquatches, and it's possible they are.
- Chekhov's Gun: There are several.
- Mostar's 3-D printer is brought up several times before Kate realizes they can use it to make barbed spearheads out of glass.
- The Boothes give Dan a coconut opener as a housewarming gift, and he eventually uses it to fight the alpha Sasquatch.
- Palomino is shown to be constantly fiddling with some homemade beanbags, which turn out to be filled with real beans that she gives to Kate for planting.
- Dan's ability to control everything in the house from his iPad comes up a few times, and in the climax he hacks the heating system in every single house to turn them into huge bombs.
- Closed Circle: Greenloop is several miles from the nearest main road...and that's before it turns out the whole road was destroyed by a landslide.
- Country Matters: Mostar uses a few particularly colorful Bosnian curses when fighting off some of the Sasquatches. Later, Yvette unleashes a Cluster C-Bomb when Tony tries to leave her behind.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Vincent is tortured and slowly dismembered, Yvette and Bobbi are ragdolled around until their necks and backs are broken, and Tony is ripped out of his car, suffering a broken leg in the process, then gets trampled into pulp by Alpha. Even the Sasquatches aren't exempt. Twin One takes a glass-bladed javelin to the lung and dies choking on his own blood. Twin Two is nearly disemboweled by another javelin and flees with his intestines hanging out, meaning he is doomed to die a slow and painful death. The juvenile Sasquatch, Goldenboy, is caught in an exploding house, then falls into a bed of punji stakes and bleeds out.
- Crush Filter: Kate almost immediately develops a crush on Tony Durant, and spends a lot of time describing how attractive she finds him, using highly elevated and complimentary language. The filter goes away pretty quickly when she realizes that Tony is actually an unprepared poseur who has no idea what to do or how to survive in a world without technology at his fingertips.
- Dangerous Windows: The Sasquatches break through the high-tech safety glass of Greenloop with ease throughout the story.
- Dead Guy on Display: After Mostar kills Consort, the elderly male Sasquatch, Kate and the other Greenloopers dump his corpse in front of the common house, in a successful effort to provoke the other Sasquatches into attacking blindly.
- Decapitation Presentation: The alpha Sasquatch throws Vincent's severed head at Kate as she's running away from the clan. It lands near Carmen and Effie's apple trees, staring right at Kate when she sees it.
- Defensive Feint Trap: The Greenloopers' last stand involves retreating to the common house, setting up a defensive perimeter of concealed punji stakes and glass shards, and luring the Sasquatches through the abandoned homes, which they then blow up by hacking the heating systems. It works pretty well in practice.
- Desecrating the Dead: In order to bait the Sasquatches into attacking in a blind fury, Kate and the others repeatedly stab Consort's corpse, and then Kate drops trou and pisses on his face, just to drive the point home. It works.
- Due to the Dead: Kate and Palomino take the time to bury their friends and family before they leave the ruins of Greenloop.
- Dwindling Party: It dwindles until it's just Kate and Palomino, and even they are most probably dead by the time of the frame story.
- Excrement Statement: During the Sasquatch attack on Greenloop, Alpha takes a dump in Kate's garden. Kate wonders if it was a deliberate statement. Later on, Kate urinates on the corpse of the alpha Sasquatch's mate in a successful effort to provoke the clan.
- Fear Is the Appropriate Response: Lampshaded by Kate and Mostar. Essentially, the more able people are those that come around quickest and prepare for the worst-case scenario.
- Final Girl: Kate, accompanied by the child Palomino.
- Foregone Conclusion: Given that the book's subtitle is "A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre", and learning early on that the town will be reduced to abandoned burnt-out rubble, it seems pretty obvious that none of the Greenloop inhabitants will survive. Unless Kate and Palomino are really out there hunting Sasquatches.
- Freudian Slip: Tony remarks that he'll be the the first—no, the last person to leave if they hear about an evacuation order. He then tries to leave the rest of Greenloop to their fate, twice.
- Genocide Survivor: Palomino is a survivor of the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, as revealed by her adopted moms Carmen and Effie. This causes her to bond with Mostar, who survived the Croat-Bosnian War.
- Giant Foot of Stomping: Maybe not as large as some, but Alpha literally stomps Tony to death.
- Gotta Kill Them All: Kate says this nearly word for word near the climax of the novel, stating that exterminating the Sasquatch clan is now their only option for survival. It's also possibly why they haven't found her and Palomino; her brother suggests that she might have taken Palomino and gone hunting for the surviving Sasquatches, as well as any other possible groups who survived Rainier.
- Hand Cannon: It's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it reference, but when he appears at the beginning of the book, Frank McCray is carrying a Smith and Wesson Model 500 revolver, a colossal handgun which fires a .50 caliber round and is marketed as a backup weapon for hunters going after dangerous large game such as bears and elephants.
- Hard Truth Aesop:
- Nature Is Not Nice. If you want to reconnect to your primal roots, great, it'll probably be good for you... but part of that is reconnecting to the necessity of survival.
- Community is indeed one of our most powerful assets, but true community is based on mutual need, not on some fuzzy notion of intrinsic human value. If you want your neighbors to help you, figure out a way to be useful to them in return.
- Hope Spot: In-universe, the Greenloopers are elated and relieved when they believe that they've communicated their peaceful intentions to the Sasquatches by echoing their pattern of knocks. Unfortunately for them, the opposite proves to be true. It's suggested by Ranger Josephine Schell that the Sasquatches may have been challenging them.
- The Hunter Becomes the Hunted: Frank speculates that the Sasquatches' ancestors hunted primitive humans, until the latter developed enough intellect to start hunting them back, driving them into hiding in the wilderness; he figures that finding the isolated community in Greenloop while starving triggered an instinct in the troop to start hunting humans again. He also chooses to believe that Katie and Palomino have once again reversed things, and are now hunting the remaining Sasquatches.
- Hypocrite: Dr. Reinhardt is a major proponent of Rousseauian philosophy, which effectively suggests that humanity has been tainted by the trappings of modern civilization and that we are at our happiest when living in a more tribal, primitive society. Reinhardt is also an overweight, lazy intellectual who has no survival skills and absolutely cannot survive without the trappings of modern civilization.
- Idiot Ball: While hiding out from the Sasquatch, Vincent insists upon trying to go and reach the road, despite the fact that there's one of him and many of them.
- Improbable Infant Survival: Everyone's deaths except Palomino (who is under ten and may be around seven) and Kate's are confirmed. While it's possible they died off-page, it's left deliberately ambiguous and it's possible they survived.
- Improvised Weapon: Mostar and Kate improvise a variety of spears and javelins from stalks of bamboo and the village's collection of kitchen knives, including a makeshift Zulu iklwa.
- It Can Think: Played with. Throughout the novel, the Sasquatches are compared to great apes such as gorillas and chimpanzees, which are known to be some of the most intelligent animals on Earth. However, the inhabitants of Greenloop, not knowing any better, treat them as dumb animals right up until they receive hard proof otherwise. This comes first in the form of the Sasquatches challenging them with rhythmic knocking, and then using a wounded Vincent as bait to try and draw the others into the forest.
- Just Think of the Potential!: In an interview, Frank describes going to a tech conference where a man was showing off how he had hacked his hand to play the piano by sequentially stimulating his muscles with electrodes, then discussing the possibilities that this technology, applied to an exosuit, offers to the disabled and the elderly. Frank raises a possibility of his own: that somebody could hack that suit and force the person wearing it to shoot up a school. Frank describes the man as looking like Frank had just kicked over his sandcastle, having never even considered the possibility of how his revolutionary technology could be used for ill.
- Ludd Was Right: Greenloop's overreliance on technology means that nobody except for Mostar has any idea what to do when the volcano erupts, but tech-bro Dan turns out to be much happier once he's been forced off the grid and has to start figuring things out for himself. To a lesser extent, so is Kate, even when they're thrust into a hellish nightmare where they have to help defend the community from the Sasquatches.
- Mama Bear: When Juno, one of the Sasquatches, grabs Palomino and tries to use her as a shield, Effie goes into a rage and throws herself at it and rips out the Bigfoot's throat with her teeth. While she is killed for her trouble, Effie does save Palomino and takes Juno with her.
- Meaningful Echo: Near the beginning of the book, Mostar refers to Dan as "your man" when speaking to Kate. Kate dislikes this because she thinks it sounds too possessive. At the end of the book, after their relationship has been rekindled by the eruption and the Sasquatch siege, Kate calls him "my man" when mourning his death in her journal.
- Mostar also notes that adversity often introduces people to their true selves when Kate is surprised by Dan's newfound energy and industriousness, closing with the remark "Nice to meet you, Danny Holland." Later on, when the Greenloopers are trying to coax Tony and Yvette out of their house, Kate looks at the drunken, slovenly wreck and malnourished harpy they've become and thinks "Nice to meet you, Mr. and Mrs. Durant."
- Mirroring Factions: By the end of the novel, there isn't much to differentiate the humans and the Sasquatches from each other; both sides are intelligent, ruthless, tribalistic apex predators locked in a desperate struggle for survival. Kate and Palomino even start eating the dead Sasquatches to survive after Greenloop is destroyed, much like how the Sasquatches killed and ate Vincent, Tony, and Yvette.
- Monster Is a Mommy: The alpha Sasquatch is implied to be the mother of two of the younger males, and there are three female Sasquatches who are either pregnant or new mothers.
- Naïve Animal Lover: Just about everybody in Greenloop except for Mostar and Dan. Bobbi, Vincent, Effie, and Carmen take this to the extreme, though, refusing to take the blatant hints that the Sasquatches are a danger to them until it's far too late.
- Nature Is Not Nice: This is essentially the point of the story, with Yvette, Bobbi, and Dr. Reinhardt showing especially naive, hippie-ish views about nature and harmony. Vincent might have started the specific aggression by knocking back to them and assuming that it meant they were now "friends" with the Sasquatch.
- Never Found the Body: Kate and Palomino, both of whom disappeared sometime after the destruction of Greenloop. Kate's brother acknowledges that they most likely died while trying to walk to safety, but he also believes or hopes they may have gone hunting for the remaining Sasquatches.
- Nicknaming the Enemy: Kate gives the Sasquatches nicknames, based on their physical traits or apparent position in the group: Alpha (the matriarch), Consort (Alpha's mate), Juno (the pregnant one), Princess (has the prettiest fur), etc.
- Newscaster Cameo: Two radio newscasters, NPR Anchor Terri Gross and Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal appear in asides where they interview characters prior to the events of the novel; both appear As Themselves in the audiobook.
- Non-Malicious Monster: Explicitly pointed out and discussed. The Sasquatches aren't evil, they're just hungry...which is quite bad enough.
- Noodle Incident: There is apparently a serious disaster movie happening off-screen during the events of the novel, involving Mount Rainer erupting apocalyptically, Tacoma being destroyed, Seattle being placed under martial law, and some sniper going crazy and picking people off on top of everything. Outside of the occasional article or headline, however, the novel acts like the reader would be familiar with all that. Justified, since all this serves to show just how cut-off and isolated from the wider world the main characters have become.
- Once More, with Clarity: On her first day in Greenloop, Kate sees a pair of hummingbirds "kissing" each other, and is delighted by this apparent evidence of nature's harmony and peacefulness. After the eruption, she sees the hummingbirds again, and this time she realizes that they're actually trying to peck each other to death.
- Only Sane Woman: Mostar, who is literally the only person in Greenloop to realize that the Rainier eruption has severed them from civilized society and that help will be a long time coming.
- Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Yvette speaks with an upper-class English accent at the beginning of the story. As the pressure mounts and she loses control, she slips back into her natural accent, which turns out to be Australian.
- Pushed at the Monster: Dr Reinhardt encourages Vincent to try to go for help when the Sasquatches are right outside. They rip him to pieces and slowly torture him to death while everyone, including his wife Bobbi, are forced to listen. It's left ambiguous whether Reinhardt genuinely believed the Sasquatches were nonviolent but he refuses to own up to encouraging Vincent (and perhaps even giving him false information that he wouldn't be hurt) until Bobbi says he killed Vincent.
- Role Swap Plot: Kate is meek and passive, unhappily married to lazy loser Dan and in awe of Yvette and Tony's perfect marriage, especially admiring how handsome and "alpha" Tony seems. After the eruption cuts them off from society, Yvette and Tony fall apart completely, go insane, refuse to leave the house, and descend into literally living in sewage before being brutally ripped apart. And Tony even abandons Yvette to her horrible fate. By contrast, Kate and Dan become extremely adept at killing Sasquatches, take on leadership roles in the group where they're both happy and extremely assertive, and Dan dies while trying to protect Kate from the alpha Sasquatch.
- Sanity Slippage: Tony and Yvette Durant are revealed to have completely fallen apart after the eruption and the onset of the Sasquatch siege. Tony has deteriorated into an unwashed, drunken mess and Yvette has been exercising constantly and starving herself, so that she's an emaciated, smelly bundle of nerves who shrieks like a madwoman at Kate and the others when they try to pry the two of them out of their house.
- Schmuck Bait: Attempted. The Sasquatches catch Vincent when he tries to hike out for help, then slowly torture him to death in an effort to draw out the rest of the Greenloop inhabitants. Mostar recognizes the tactic from her time living through the Bosnian War and manages to keep anyone else from going after him.
- Scrapbook Story: To a lesser extent than World War Z, but Kate's diary is interpreted with interviews and the occasional article.
- Senseless Sacrifice and Stupid Sacrifice: Vincent's death is a rare example of both. He goes out to try and confront or bypass the Sasquatches to get help...while the whole group are waiting just outside Greenloop. While he didn't know just how dangerous or intelligent they were, he had no actual plan and admitted as much, meaning that his death, on top of being (intentionally) the most horrible in the book, achieved nothing.
- Solar Punk: Greenloop has some elements of solar punk. Its houses are made from recycled materials and laden with green technology, such as solar panels and biofuel-powered heating systems, and it is envisioned as a communal society where people of all walks of life can live and work in touch with nature and each other, rather than being crammed into loud, dirty, overpopulated cities or cookie-cutter suburbs.
- Sound-Only Death: Vincent, horrifically. The group hears him screaming while they're having dinner in the common house, and the Sasquatch deliberately leave him alive and slowly torture him to death, ripping off each of his limbs, in an attempt to lure everyone else out.
- Take That!: There are many to Bourgeois Bohemians and Naive Animal Lovers. Josephine Schell and Frank McCray repeatedly point out how horribly unprepared Greenloop was for any kind of natural disaster or other major incident because of their overreliance on bleeding-edge tech and a delicate, easily disrupted supply chain. Schell also lectures the author on the folly of trying to force nature to adapt to our convenience, rather than the other way around. Bobbi tries to insist that they shouldn't hurt the Sasquatches even when they're trying to break in because it would be cruel, and Carmen also demands to know why Mostar thinks the Sasquatches are "evil". Mostar calls her on this, pointing out that they're attacking Greenloop not because they're evil, but because they're hungry.
- At one point, Schell also delivers a blistering broadside against a certain "alcoholic, woman-beating, racist anti-Semite" and the movie he made about South American natives.
- Title Drop: Frank uses the term "devolution" to describe his theory of the Sasquatches instinctually reverting to an ancient mindset of hunting humans when they stumbled onto Greenloop.
- Took a Level in Badass: Most of the inhabitants of Greenloop, particularly Kate and Dan. The only exception is Mostar, because she was a badass to begin with.
- Too Proud for Lowly Work: An extreme case of this is implied to be why Tony and Yvette hide away from everyone else (aside from Sanity Slippage). Both believe they are too good to do any kind of manual work and detest having to take orders from Mostar, who has become the camp's de facto leader. Dr. Reinhardt has no survival skills either, and resents having to learn how to do anything.
- Trail of Blood: The surviving villagers find two leading out of Reinhardt's house. One for his body, the other for his head.
- The Unmasqued World: The government has collected every scrap of evidence from the ruins of Greenloop, as would be standard for a cover-up, but the park ranger, Josephine Schell, points out that the official investigation is still ongoing, no serious attempts at censorship are being made, and they haven't even bothered with a believable cover story for Greenloop's destruction (something particularly glaring since it's a town that was literally destroyed only a few hundred miles from what was apparently one of the most severe volcanic eruptions ever). She believes that they're planning to cash in on the fact that Sasquatches are real and are simply waiting for people to regain some sense of normalcy before going public.Schell: They're not going to bury this, stick the evidence in a crate and warehouse it like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I think the truth'll come out for no other reason than they want it to. Think about it! Tourist dollars! Zoo fees! . . . We'll be able to rebuild the Rainier damage and then some when the whole world flocks here for the chance to glimpse a living legend.
- Uncertain Doom: Kate and Palomino disappeared sometime between the destruction of Greenloop and the arrival of Josephine Schell's rescue team. Kate's brother acknowledges that they most likely died while trying to walk to safety, but suggests that they might have gone hunting for the survivors of the Sasquatch clan.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Kate's brother Frank, who asked her to move into his house in Greenloop after a messy breakup with his husband, and thus put her directly in the path of the Rainier eruption and the marauding Sasquatches. Also possibly Vincent; by answering the Sasquatches' knocks with his own, he may have inadvertently challenged them to a battle for dominance.
- Vasquez Always Dies: Mostar, who teaches Kate everything she needs to know and is an Action Survivor and Cool Old Lady who is easily the most prepared character, dies.
- Wham Line: Just after Vincent cheerfully responds to the Sasquatches' wood-knocking and the Greenloop residents assume they created a friendly bond, Schell drops this comment in the next excerpt that turns the situation From Bad to Worse:Schell: And for all we know, wood knocking denotes a challenge, which Vincent Boothe unwittingly accepted.
