Listen free for 30 days

Listen with offer

Offer ends May 1st, 2024 11:59PM GMT. Terms and conditions apply.
£7.99/month after 3 months. Renews automatically.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Devolution cover art

Devolution

By: Max Brooks
Narrated by: Judy Greer,Max Brooks,Jeff Daniels,Nathan Fillion,Mira Furlan,Terry Goss,Kimberly Guerrero,Kate Mulgrew,Kai Ryssdal,Steven Weber
Get this deal Try for £0.00

Pay £99p/month. After 3 months pay £7.99/month. Renews automatically. See terms for eligibility.

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.

Listeners also enjoyed...

Closure, Limited and Other Zombie Tales cover art
Sundered cover art
The Zombie War Battle for Britain cover art
This Is the Way the World Ends cover art
Rolling in the Deep cover art
Before He Wakes cover art
A Drop of Magic cover art
The Shuddering cover art
The Troop cover art
Devil's Desk cover art
Autumn: The London Trilogy cover art
The Ruins cover art
FantasticLand cover art
Dead Silence cover art
Jurassic Park cover art
Night Terrors Volumes 1 - 3 cover art

Summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

FROM THE #1 BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF WORLD WAR Z

As the ash and chaos from Mount Rainier's eruption swirled and finally settled, the story of the Greenloop massacre has passed unnoticed, unexamined . . . until now.

But the journals of resident Kate Holland, recovered from the town's bloody wreckage, capture a tale too harrowing - and too earth-shattering in its implications - to be forgotten.

In these pages, Max Brooks brings Kate's extraordinary account to light for the first time, faithfully reproducing her words alongside his own extensive investigations into the massacre and the beasts behind it, once thought legendary but now known to be terrifyingly real.

Kate's is a tale of unexpected strength and resilience, of humanity's defiance in the face of a terrible predator's gaze, and inevitably, of savagery and death.

Yet it is also far more than that.

Because if what Kate Holland saw in those days is real, then we must accept the impossible. We must accept that the creature known as Bigfoot walks among us - and that it is a beast of terrible strength and ferocity.

Part survival narrative, part bloody horror tale, part scientific journey into the boundaries between truth and fiction, this is a Bigfoot story as only Max Brooks could chronicle it - and like none you've ever read before.

The cast:
Judy Greer as Kate Holland
Nathan Fillion as Frank McCray
Kimberly Guerrero as Josephine Schell

With:
Jeff Daniels as Steve Morgan
Mira Furlan as Mostar
Kate Mulgrew as Hannah Reinhardt-Roth
Steven Weber as Tony Durant
and
Terry Gross and Kai Ryssdal as themselves
and
Max Brooks as the researcher  

©2019 Max Brooks (P)2019 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

'Devolution is one of the greatest horror novels I've ever read. The characters soar, the ideas sing, and it's all going to scare the living daylights out of you.' Blake Crouch, author of Dark Matter and Recursion

'Devolution is spell binding. It is a horror story about how anyone, especially those who think they are above it, can slowly devolve into primal, instinctual behaviour. I was gripped from the first page to the last!' Les Stroud, creator of Survivorman

'Brooks packs his plot with action, information, and atmosphere, and captures both the foibles and the heroism of his characters. This slow-burning page-turner will appeal to Brooks' devoted fans and speculative fiction readers who enjoy tales of monsters.' Publishers Weekly

What listeners say about Devolution

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    373
  • 4 Stars
    151
  • 3 Stars
    65
  • 2 Stars
    23
  • 1 Stars
    15
Performance
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    410
  • 4 Stars
    86
  • 3 Stars
    34
  • 2 Stars
    11
  • 1 Stars
    14
Story
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    332
  • 4 Stars
    128
  • 3 Stars
    59
  • 2 Stars
    22
  • 1 Stars
    11

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Sort by:
Filter by:
  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

Character Breakdown!

We know that Max Brooks can do much better than this! Even with an excellent full cast thrown at it this feels well below his best. The setup of an exclusive and remote eco-village without compromise artificially introduces to as cliched a set of characters as I can remember. And that cast do damn well so there are no problems there, especially Judy Greer who puts in a genuinely excellent performance as the lead. She shows good changes of pace and tone and manages to inject a lot of emotion and energy into her delivery.

That lead, Kate Holland, is probably the most interesting character but it took a long while before I stopped finding her irritating and that was only because she suddenly transforms from a poor caricature of a 'millenial type' into something more like Ellen Ripley! Among the others are the arrogant professor who won't believe anything but his own opinion, a pair of hardline vegans who object to even the thought of harming animals threatening them and an impossibly attractive and successful couple. To me this is a really lazy and unnecessary setup which belies some of the occasional genuine quality in the writing that does shine through.

The story is presented through extracts from Holland's journal of her experiences in the eco-village, a tried and tested formula that works reasonably well but it is also interspersed with what I felt were low-value extracts from interviews, quotes and thoughts about the Big Foot legend. This made the story feel quite bitty at times and while some were very worthwhile a lot of them didn't seem to add much.

So, in summary, I don't feel Max made the best of his ideas in this one, the characters are just too cliched and a lot of it felt lazy in its construction. There are some quality moments in the writing and an exciting ending but I felt there was a lot to endure to get that pay-off despite an extremely good performance from Judy Greer.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

5 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Brooks does it again

Fine work. I was at first put off by the subject matter, I'm not from usa so the bigfoot is just a silly thing to me like other silly foreign things like trickle down economics or such , not part of a legendarium. But mr Brooks turned it into something else. Still don't care about bigfoot of course but a lot of the commentary that mr Brooks sneaked in is very insightful, and some themes, like the references to a certain siege and tragedy in my side of the atlantic or the sense of entitlement of so many westerners in general , are important to me.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

Not as clever as expected from Brooks

Struggled to get to the end even though its short and has an excellent narration cast... Although this cast list a bit of a fib, as most of the big names have a couple of minutes at most , a cameo, the main narrator is so 'happy american', so over emotive that her performance lends a false ness to the whole story - there wasn't a single moment that I was 'in' the story. The story is so B movie stupid that it hurts to think about it, for example, the first act of a group cut off in their forest commune would not be to plant seeds in their garage so they can 'survive the next two years', they have vehicles, they'd use them, and walk if they couldn't. The author read The Martian and wanted some of that 'survive through ingenuity' action. Just a C- at best, and very forgettable, not badly written, but certainly lacking in the layers present in the authors previous success WWZ.
The epilogue is woefully stupid, embarrassing... Really suggest that you skip this one.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    2 out of 5 stars

narration extremely grating

This is probably just a personal preference but I really disliked the main narrators performance

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    2 out of 5 stars

Oh Mr Brooks….. what happened :(

First off, huge Max Brooks fan… so if you are too please don’t listen to this audio book. It’s seriously damaged my opinion of his work.

I so rarely write reviews but this audio book just got on my nerves so much I actually found myself shouting at it on several occasions and wanted to review it as part of my anger management over it.

So to start, and this is probably the biggest issue I have with it…… why for the love of God did it use the journal method to tell the story ?
It would have worked if it had just time jumped back and forth from the interview sections to a first person account of the events. Literally every few seconds I was either mouthing to myself or saying out loud “ who in the history of the world has ever written a journal in a style like this “. For example there’s one chapter where the main character begins by talking about how she sets off hiking alone but her partner ( who hasn’t been given her enough attention later yardda yadda ) suddenly joins her and they hold hands and it’s wonderful thing. Then a few minutes later they stumble into a Bigfoot nest complete with human remains then the entire herd of Sasquatch surround them and they have to fight for their lives to escape…….. just out of interest, anyone else here thinks that a character might lead with the Bigfoot life or death encounter rather than a whole 10 minutes on the way her love life is going ????

Also I whole heartedly agree with other reviews here, the main character is just the most annoying person, the constant questioning her own statements gets tiresome really quickly and the other element that seems to get used an incredible amount was where the main character hadn’t witnessed something so the author would write something along the lines of “ I ran but later I was told what happened by one of the others “ and would then recount a scene with a ridiculous amount of detail and in the same style as if she had witnessed it first hand. This was really stupid when she gives a literal blow by blow account of a knife fight between a Bigfoot and one of the other characters. It includes the exact wounds and combat moves …… all this recounted by a 9 year old girl that throughout the books is referred to as not saying much. Not to mention the part where tithe lead character talks about stones getting thrown with a noise like ‘thwack’, this in itself wouldn’t be a problem but after the 8th ‘thwack’ you’re starting to think the author is padding somewhat…I think the reader/listener gets the idea after a couple of thwacks.

Just stupid and what’s really annoying is that this could all just been overcome if it hadn’t been in a journal format.

The interview sections are great with some top quality actors but are way too short.

It’s a short audio book and that’s the only reason I kept going with it but seriously at times it was like the author hadn’t read bits back to himself.

Really really disappointed by this one.

Oh, I’d have given the performances 5 stars if not for the lead character narration. It might just be because the character was so poorly conceived and terribly executed but I just couldn’t take to the actors voice.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Brilliant

slow starter but what a finish! highly recommend for fans of WWZ or horror books in general

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Gave me two sleepless nights

As a fan of bigfoot horror novels and movies, this is probably the best I've read. Took me two days to read, and I will admit I had trouble sleeping for two nights - the book's second kill kept on playing over in my head.

As the blurb indicates, this is a found journal story about a small community of 11, cut off from civilisation after a natural disaster, and come under attack from a hungry family of bigfoot as food becomes scarce.

The story takes it's time to develop the community, and the immediate aftermath of the volcano erruption for a while before the bigfoot turn up. This slower build up may not be for everyone, especially given most bigfoot horror stories are standard pulp horror with several random hikers being introduced only to to die in the same chapter every chapter or two.

However, this book having a smaller cast makes each death feel more impactful as the community shrinks. And because it's via journal many kills are "off-screen", the journal writer's imagination guessing happened. The deaths she does see are a lot more realistic, like how chimps kill monkeys, than the way monsters usually kill humans. Overall it's feels more believable and quiet chilling.

Really enjoyed. Will listen again.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

Hmmm....

The first half of the book is the survival story of a bunch or unlikable characters after a volcano eruption.

The second half is the survival story of a bunch of unlikeable characters after a Bigfoot attack.

Not bad, but not great. And, initially, Judy Greer is painful to listen to, until she dials it down a tad...

Worth a punt, but you'll know if you're in for the long haul, pretty early in.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Amazing listen!

Thoroughly enjoyed this book! Max Brooks have done an incredible job at depicting at, in my opinion, how our creature comforts or lack there of can change our nature...

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    1 out of 5 stars

Needs a different reader.

I don't know who was reading the diary parts of the book but she was awful with a whiny US accent and I lost count of how many times she said 'totally'! A waste of money. Can I get my money back on this?

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful