In conversation, writer Scott Smith is such an appealingly modest Midwesterner, you wonder how it is that he is thriving in megapolitan New York City. After all, he is a guy who says things like, "I always liked writing. But I never entitled myself to the idea that I could make a living being a writer. Growing up in Ohio that seemed hubristic. Just not allowed." Or, regarding his writing habits, "I'm very distractible, but I am comfortable with my distractibility."

On the other hand, Smith is the same fellow who, fresh out of the Columbia University MFA writing program, penned the mesmerizing best-selling novel, A Simple Plan, a harrowing morality tale of a sort-of-normal, sort-of-understandable progression of evil in which nine people end up getting murdered. Smith then went on to write the screenplay for the somewhat different, but equally chilling movie version of A Simple Plan, directed by Sam Raimi and starring Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton and Bridget Fonda. And now he has completed the deeply scary (and sometimes darkly humorous) horror novel The Ruins. For which he is, of course, writing the screenplay.

So perhaps some deeper, darker (and more darkly comic) current flows through Smith's veins – an effervescent sort of ice water, perhaps – that allows him to live as comfortably as a New Yorker as he once did as a Midwesterner.

But if Smith is aware of the deep fissure that yawns open between the memorably creepy products of his imagination and his friendly, sincere, self-effacing, humorous and somewhat bemused conversational self, he's not copping to it during a phone call to his apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. He tiptoes to the brink of admission when he remarks that his wife, Elizabeth Hill, a writer he met in grad school, is his first reader and the reader he has in mind when he writes his novels, and then adds, deadpan, "Even though she's my ideal reader, she's not my ideal reader, since she hasn't finished either of my books. They make her too uncomfortable. I guess."

For readers who enjoy being so discomfited that the hair on their neck stands on end, however, The Ruins is just the book to curl up with on a dark and stormy night. Unfortunately, what is best and most interesting about The Ruins – particularly the way Smith toys with our expectations about what a horror/survival tale should be is impossible to discuss without stealing from would-be readers the novel's most hair-raising pleasures.

In The Ruins, two young couples on a post-graduation vacation in Cancun agree to help a German youth they've met on the beach locate his brother, who has impetuously gone off with a pretty archeologist to a dig at nearby Mayan ruins in the jungle. The five, plus a happy-go-lucky Greek tourist they meet along the way, set off on their little dirt-road trip, despite increasingly ominous signs, and are soon trapped at the hilltop ruins, awaiting rescue, while a very scary entity tries to lure them to their deaths. From there things go from grim to grimmer.

"I had a short story idea about a group of archeologists who dig up a disease that sickens everyone back when I was in graduate school," Smith says. "Scraps of paper, an idea I never did anything with." He stuck it in a folder and went on to other things.

After completing A Simple Plan, Smith worked for five years on a novel about a feud in a small town. He ended up with over a thousand pages, which, he says, was about a quarter of the imagined book. A monstrosity. "I couldn't stop writing and I knew it wasn't going to work, so I fled to screenwriting. The opportunities were there after the movie of A Simple Plan came out, and I had a sense there was a window of opportunity that was going to shut very rapidly."

He worked on a number of projects with Ben Stiller, who at one point had planned to direct A Simple Plan. He adapted a history book about Edwin and John Wilkes Booth. He worked on a comedy. He adapted the Richard Stark novel Backflash. "I've been lucky in terms of the people I've worked with," Smith says. "They've given me a lot of leeway. I haven't had any of those horror stories that you read about between studio executives and screenwriters."

When Smith decided to attempt another novel, he opted to do a genre-based book with a strong plot. "I had just seen the movie Signs and thought it would be fun to create that horror movie chill effect. When I went back through my folder of ideas and came across this archeologist idea, I thought, what if they dig up something that isn't a disease but has a horror element instead."

The Ruins, as the author points out, is "oddly internal" for a horror novel. Smith allows readers to peer intently into the psyches of his four main characters as their love and friendships begin to crack under the pressure of the threat to their individual survival. This adds greatly to a reader's growing sense of doom. "When it came to choices, I would always opt to push it further," Smith says, "because I have an instinct that if I'm uncomfortable with it, I should do it."

Yet according to Smith, his seemingly well-crafted horror novel just sort of happened, without anywhere near the degree of planning and plotting that went into his first novel. Asked, for example, about a darkly comic and deviously resonant scene in which the central characters imagine who will play them in the movie version of their escape tale, Smith says, simply, "I needed them to have something to talk about. And that just came the day that I wrote it."

Hmmm.

But then again maybe one needn't – or shouldn't – probe too deeply for the sources of this casual, dark inspiration. Maybe it's enough simply to echo the cover blurb's exclamation that the product of Smith's inspiration and labors is "unputdownable."

Unputdownable? Is that a word? "I wondered about that myself," Smith says laughing. But real word or not, it's an apt description of Scott Smith's The Ruins.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

Author photo by Joyce Ravid.

Stephen King has been scaring us silly for 35 years with the simplest premise: What if? For instance, what if dogs could kill (Cujo)? Or clowns (It)? Or telekinetic prom queens (Carrie)? Or a '58 Plymouth Fury (Christine)? Or cell phones (The Cell)?

The "what-if" behind King's haunting, horrific and ultimately transcendent new novel, Lisey's Story, is a decidedly personal one: What if I'd died after being hit by a minivan on that Maine country road in 1999?

King's accident made headlines worldwide and prompted many to wonder: Will he ever write at peak form again, and if so, what might his fertile imagination create out of his own near-death encounter?

Lisey's Story is our answer. At once King's most personal and most playful novel, it examines the quarter-century marriage of best-selling novelist Scott Landon through the eyes of his widow Lisey (pronounced LEE-see), two years after her husband's death. King uses pivotal moments in the marriage—an enchanted snowbound honeymoon, a Mark David Chapman-like assassination attempt at a Nashville library groundbreaking ceremony—as portals into the secret emotional sanctuary, complete with its own language, that the couple built together to keep the encroaching world at bay.

In life, Scott escaped his demons—including a horrific family madness that made his childhood a living hell—by retreating to Boo'ya Moon, a creative haven with its own internal logic. In Boo'ya Moon, all the bools (ritualized treasure hunts taken from King's own childhood) end with candy bars instead of bloodletting, and no bad-gunky (murderous rage) is allowed. After Scott's death, as Lisey sorts through his papers, she becomes the target of rabid academics (dubbed Incunks), and one fanatical fan in particular who will force her to return to Boo'ya Moon one last time for a fight to the finish.

What scares Stephen King? If we can read between the lines of Lisey's Story, it's the devastating effect his own untimely demise might have had on his wife and fellow novelist Tabitha, to whom this book is dedicated.

In an interview with BookPage, King cautions that Lisey's Story should not be read as autobiographical—for instance, the Kings have three children, the Landons are childless—but he admits that his own thoughts on mortality permeate the pages.

"Sure, there's no doubt about that. I had the accident, and then as kind of an outfall of the accident, two years later I had pneumonia because the bottom of my right lung was crumpled and nobody realized that. It got infected and that was very serious, that was actually closer [to death] than the accident. So I had some of those mortality issues," he says.

While he recuperated and weaned himself from pain medications, he started thinking about the unsung hero behind the artist.

"Spouses of creative people never get credit, and a lot of time they get the blame," he says. "There's that story about Robert Louis Stevenson's wife urging him to throw the first draft of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde into the fire, which he did, and then he wrote the thing again. What nobody ever suggests is that maybe she was right and that the second go-round was actually better than the first."

That said, King concedes that Tabitha King, who edits his books as he does hers, seems to have reservations about Lisey's Story.

"I don't think she's real crazy about this book, to tell you the truth," he says. "I think that she respects it and everything, but she's real quiet about this book. She says to me sometimes, 'Are you ever going to write about anything besides writers?' I do think sometimes she feels like I've gotten caught in a little bit of a warp there. And she may feel that it's a little close to the bone."

King, like his character Scott, is passionate about what he terms "the pool" from which we all draw the language to articulate our thoughts and feelings.

"It's a real, literal place; it isn't just some kind of an arty-farty, ephemeral deal. It makes a difference in the way we live and you can see it day to day," he says. "Every time a monster like Karl Rove crafts a phrase like 'flip-flop' or 'cut-and-run' and it becomes part of the language, he's going down to the pool and casting his net and saying, Look, this matters. And it does, because that gets amplified in the popular culture and becomes a factor in the way people perceive the political process and the way they vote."

King heaps the most scorn here on academics who dog the heels of famous writers, hoping for a rare scrap on which to build their own reputations. As one who has spent more than half his life as one of the world's most recognizable writers, does he simply ignore the critics, or does he feel underappreciated by the literary community precisely because he's, well, King of the hill?

"Sometimes I feel both ways," he says. "At the end of the year, the [New York] Times Book Review will do a list of the books of the year that mattered, and I always feel on some level that any book that sells X number of copies is de facto excluded because there's a feeling that once you sell a certain number of copies, you can't be good. It's like if too many people are reading you, some kind of mathematical formula comes into play which says ergo, the IQ of your book equals… you must be doing stuff on a James Patterson level. That's a little bit bothersome. But on another level, you just kind of dismiss that and say I'm going to do the best work that I can and try to ignore that and be very grateful that the bills are paid."

King admits part of him didn't want the writing of Lisey's Story to end. "I'm a fool for Lisey; I kind of fell in love with her. I'm working on a book now and I had trouble finding traction on anything after Lisey's Story because there's part of you that says it's going to be a long time, if ever, before I write anything this good again."

Jay MacDonald writes from Austin, Texas.

A chat with Chuck Palahniuk is not unlike reading one of his novels. Both offer a compelling mélange of the profound and the perverse, the terrifyingly strange and the strangely touching, viewed through the dark lens of a satiric minimalist whose intent is to get under our skin in order to reveal the humanity beneath. Like such clear-eyed predecessors as William S. Burroughs, Anthony Burgess, J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick, Palahniuk serves up a naked buffet of disturbing images from the bedlam of modern life in order to point out their desensitizing effects on us all. In less chaotic times, Palahniuk (pronounced Paula-nick) might have been put to the stake as a blasphemer, blacklisted as a pornographer or institutionalized as a loon. But these days, his many fans consider him a visionary, if not a full-blown prophet. Which only goes to prove his point—crazy times call for drastic measures.

Comes now Palahniuk's eighth wild ride, Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey, a documentary-style faux oral history that stitches together comments of 100-plus characters on the short, extraordinary life of Buster "Rant" Casey, a teenage rebel whose iconic death in a fiery car crash made him a dashboard saint among a cult of teenage car-crash enthusiasts.

Rant unfolds in two parts. The first centers on Casey's unconventional childhood in small-town Middleton, where the lonely teen seeks a natural high—and in the process develops heightened sensitivities—by intentionally soliciting the poisonous stings and bites of various insects, mammals and reptiles. When he contracts rabies, he becomes Patient Zero, a "superspreader" whose saliva sets off an AIDS-like epidemic.

In part two, Casey departs Middleton for the big city, where the haves work days, the have-nots work nights, and government curfews enforce this bipolar disorder. He falls in with a group of Party Crashers, who endure their nighttime exile by intentionally crashing their cars into each other to feel in the moment, when time stands still. It turns out these "liminal" moments have a place in time travel as well, an unexpected second-act plot twist that hijacks the narrative in a baffling new direction.

On the V-for-visceral shelf that already holds his violent 1996 debut Fight Club, the sex-addict satire Choke and the Grand Guignol Haunted, this new novel is Palahniuk's ode to loners, losers, misfits and mavericks willing to risk everything just to feel one true thing in these soporific times.

Palahniuk, 45, prepared to write Rant, the first of a planned Middleton trilogy, by reading the adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn "about a thousand times."

"Maybe my reason for writing this book is, I've fallen into a point in my life where I am fantastically nostalgic about my growing up, and I really wanted to go back and explore all those memories," he says. "My growing up was really s—ty, but I want to be honest and prove to myself that I'm not nostalgic for the actual past; I'm nostalgic for being a child again, and for the family I've lost."

Palahniuk's memories of growing up in Burbank, Washington, just upriver from his current home in the Columbia Gorge area near Portland, Oregon, take some macabre forms in Rant. Casey's mother, for instance, proudly shares her recipes for baking foreign objects, from razor blades to ground glass, into her cakes and pies to make eating them a memorable experience. It's hard to pin down the actual facts of Palahniuk's life, since he's a self-styled mystery man not above erecting a few facades to keep the world at a comfortable distance. Still, there is some truth behind the scene where Casey gathers graphic sensory information about his neighbors by sniffing their, uh, personal wastes.

"When big windstorms would kick up, everyone's trashcan would blow over and our barbed wire fences would be hung with everybody's secrets, all the tampons, all the rubbers, all the things they couldn't flush down the toilet or burn," he says. "People would have to go out with bags and pick these flags of shame off the barbed wire."

Palahniuk fashioned his young protagonist on the classic rugged individualist, an archetype in American fiction that stretches from Tom and Huck to Randall Patrick McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

" It's a character that Americans have always found really appealing, so what would be the next version?" he wonders. "How do you reinvent that character?"

The second act of Rant—which careens between the Party Crashers' various theme nights (formal wear for wedding night, lighted trees on top for Christmas, mattresses for moving day, etc.) and various Ph.D.s digressing on anthropologist Victor Turner's classic essay " Liminality and Communitas"—has its roots in Palahniuk's experiences at the annual counterculture gathering known as Burning Man. That festival once featured such shoot-'em-ups as a drive-by shooting gallery and a Big Car Hunt on the Nevada desert, until festival numbers grew so large that organizers were forced to abandon the cars-and-guns catharsis. The author, who once participated in the Big Car Hunt, contends that Party Crashing is now commonplace in some West Coast cities, including Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

"It's Fight Club with cars. It's an equal opportunity, non- gender-specific, non-age-or-race-specific fight," he says. "You need a physical activity like a rave or Burning Man for people to engage in that gives them this liminoid structure so they can come together in mutual communitas [an unstructured, egalitarian community]."

Palahniuk, who alternates edgier works (Fight Club, Lullaby, Haunted) with "lighter" satires (Choke, Diary, Rant), describes as "appalling" next year's offering, Snuff, about the making of an adult film that goes bad. Does this shock author ever give himself nightmares with his Boschian visions?

"That's the entire point, to get yourself to a place that you couldn't have planned or calculated, that is kind of beyond what you think you're capable of," he admits. "At that moment, you feel like you've done enough when you've gone a little bit too far, because otherwise, if you don't go that little bit too far, later you'll wish you had. You just keep reminding yourself, it's just words on the page."

Jay MacDonald writes from Austin.

Joe Hill says it took him quite a while to find the spark that would make his riveting new horror novel roar to life. Though he ended up writing the bulk of NOS4A2 in about seven months, getting the book started wasn’t easy.

“I struggled with figuring out how I wanted to write a female lead,” Hill says by phone from his home in New England. The novel’s main character, Victoria McQueen, is a tough, wild thing with an unusual talent. When we meet her as a young girl, Vic has just discovered that sometimes, much to her surprise, her beloved Raleigh bicycle takes her to a covered bridge that shouldn’t exist. When she rides the Raleigh across the bridge, Vic finds whatever lost object had been on her mind: a teddy bear, her mother’s bracelet and, later on, serious trouble.

From the start, Hill knew the basics of the story, its broad arc and time span. But he wasn’t quite sure how to frame it. “That took a little while to figure out,” he says.

Then, like Vic, the author set out to find trouble—specifically, he needed to find Charlie Manx, the story’s villain, a creepy but weirdly charismatic old man, a kidnapper who might also be something much worse. “It took me longer to find Manx’s voice than almost any character I’ve ever struggled to reach,” Hill says. “That was a lot of the struggle early in the book. Then once I found it, it was like a big car engine turning over.”

“Sometimes the less you know, the scarier someone is.”

Charlie Manx drives a sleek black 1938 Rolls-Royce with the license plate “NOS4A2.” (“It is one of my little jokes,” Manx tells another character early in the book. “My first wife once accused me of being a Nosferatu.”) Manx’s crooked teeth, bony skull and hawk-like stare make him instantly sinister, but he’s also—like all the best bad guys—mysteriously seductive, and he genuinely believes he’s helping the kids he lures in. It’s precisely this bizarre mix of evil and magnanimity that makes the old guy such a charmer. As Hill puts it: “He’s so happy!”

Manx drives around collecting children with bleak futures, “rescuing” them and taking them to a place he calls Christmasland. To Manx, he’s doing these kids the favor of their lives. Even if they resist at first, a ride in the Rolls makes Christmasland irresistible to Manx’s young passengers. “When they get out of the car,” Hill says, “they are filled with joy.”

Never mind that they are also . . . in for a surprise. The Rolls-Royce, it turns out, runs on souls instead of unleaded.

“I like a big, fat, high concept to hang a story on,” Hill acknowledges. And this is an enormous novel: 704 pages long, spanning 25 years and much of the United States, not to mention a few landscapes in other dimensions. Hill says he’d been wanting to go big for a while, and part of the draw of writing such a vast tale came from his fondness for episodic storytelling, the kind Dickens used to do. As far back as the ’50s, Hill points out, one of the highest goals for a fiction writer was to have a story serialized in The New Yorker. Even today there’s plenty of great episodic storytelling to be found—it just happens to be on television instead of paper. “ ‘Breaking Bad’ isn’t a TV show,” Hill says, “it’s a novel.”

As Hill’s fans know, NOS4A2 is not his first venture into epic story­telling; he’s spent years writing episodes of the dark-fantasy comic book Locke & Key, which is illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez (who also did the illustrations for NOS4A2). Like the novel, Locke & Key is concerned with the idea that magic and wonder, though commonplace in childhood, are either lost or dangerous to adults.

“When I was growing up, a lot of my literary heroes were comic book writers,” Hill says. He mentions Alan Moore’s 40-issue run on Swamp Thing; Frank Miller; Neil Gaiman’s Sandman; and later examples such as Brian K. Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man, all of which turned him on to the idea of writing something episodic. “I wanted to have something like that,” he says. “I wanted to see what it was like to have a story that would take me years to tell.” The constancy of writing Locke & Key, he found, was a comfort, a touchstone he could rely on during difficult times in his personal life.

Like the issues of Locke & Key, chapters in NOS4A2 frequently end with a cliffhanger—sometimes even in the middle of a sentence.

“I had no shame,” Hill says. “I tried to make one chapter end where it would be hard to put the book down.” Further demonstrating the pull of episodic storytelling, this was an “extension of what I’ve done in Locke & Key.”

Later this year, Hill adds, he plans to write a comic book set in the NOS4A2 universe. It will be drawn by Charles Wilson III (The Stuff of Legend), whose style Hill calls “really terrifically disturbing, like if R. Crumb illustrated Winnie the Pooh.” The comic will include a Charlie Manx origin story that originally took up almost 100 pages in the novel but was lopped out for pacing reasons, and because Hill thought it somehow reduced the level of Manx’s menace. Using the example of Darth Vader, Hill points out that some of the greatest villains are great only until we find out where they came from: “Sometimes the less you know, the scarier someone is.”

Which brings us, conveniently, to the Joe Hill origin story. Hill’s dad happens to be Stephen King, though he kept this a secret for the first decade or so of his writing life. He’d started writing fiction seriously while in college, and he worried that even if he wrote something mediocre, someone might publish it anyway because of the famous name, and then he’d be branded as the guy trying to “ride the coattails.” He also wanted the freedom to write whatever he felt like, including genre fiction. So he chose a pen name (drawing on his full name, Joseph Hillstrom King) and kept his famous parentage under wraps mostly “by failing,” he says, adding with a laugh: “Nothing assures your anonymity like failure.”

Though it was, of course, frustrating when he couldn’t sell his first novel to a publisher, Hill now sees that as “the pen name doing its work.” He did find early success in comics and with his short stories, and eventually his agent (who also didn’t know he was King’s son) sold a collection of stories to PS Publishing, which opened the door to the publication of his novel Heart-Shaped Box, in 2007. That book drew enough media attention that clues to his identity began to emerge. Bloggers would speculate, particularly after readings and public appearances (Hill looks strikingly like his father). But his savvier fans cooperated in keeping the secret, until eventually a mainstream magazine broke the news. By then, though, the pen name had done its job: Hill was confident that he had earned his success on his own merits. “In the end,” he says, “you will always be judged by your own work, and it doesn’t matter who your dad is.”

(Adding to the family’s literary legacy, Hill’s brother, Owen King, has also just published a novel, Double Feature.)

Hill is hard at work on his next novel, which he’s about halfway through and expects to publish in 2014. “I’m trying to get faster,” he adds. He writes full-time: “It’s a 9-to-5 job.”

When he’s not at work, Hill likes riding his motorbike, a Triumph Bonneville (not coincidentally, an old Triumph figures prominently in NOS4A2). For the novel’s publicity tour, he says, “I was toying with the idea of getting an Evel Knievel suit and riding from bookstore to bookstore . . . you know, you want to put on a good show.”

Believe it or not, Max Brooks’ sensational new novel of anthropological horror, Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre, is about the real world.

“It basically came out of the idea that we are racing headlong to build a society for comfort and not for resilience,” Brooks says. “And in order to have those comforts, we’re gutting all the safeguards that previous generations worked so hard to build for us.”

“We are racing headlong to build a society for comfort and not for resilience.”

After the global zombie apocalypse of his bestselling World War Z, Brooks now focuses his catastrophic lens on a microcosm of inevitable collapse. In Devolution, a small group of highly civilized individuals has created Greenloop, a perfectly fabricated environmentalist utopia in the woods of Washington state, in the shadow of Mount Rainier’s dormant volcano. When the mountain erupts, the community of Greenloop—now cut off from contact with the rest of the world—utterly breaks down.

Then a family of sasquatch drops in. And they’re hungry.

Greenloop goes to the very heart of our era’s technological hubris. Brooks describes the organization as the brainchild of Steve Jobs and Timothy Treadwell—the famous “Grizzly Man” who was mauled and eaten by a grizzly bear. “At the height of the Iraq War, I had an epiphany,” Brooks says. “Americans are dying, a whole country is going down in flames, the world order is collapsing. A couple of generations ago, our country’s best and brightest would be working on trying to solve that problem. And instead, we get a turtlenecked P.T. Barnum crowing about how the greatest new invention is the ability to watch ‘The Office’ on our cell phones.”

Brooks is effusive about what he has learned from his parents, Hollywood icons Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft, who were part of the generation that confronted the existential threats of the early and mid-20th century, and who imparted to him their values. “The stories I grew up with were Great Depression and World War II stories,” Brooks says. “They were about people digging inside themselves, finding the grit and courage they didn’t know they had. Because they had to.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Devolution.

That noble American generation is a far cry from Devolution’s characters Tony and Yvette Durant, the charismatic leaders of Greenloop. The Durants epitomize what Brooks sees as our civilization’s delusional belief in technology’s capacity to save us. “You have this divorce of the intelligentsia from the real world,” he says. “The problem with a lot of the environmental movement is that it comes from urbanites who have no idea how the natural world actually works. They have their own version of it, reliant on a kind of technology that allows you to have it all, no sacrifice, no compromise. That is so American.”

The novel’s narrative is framed by a scientific researcher’s investigation into the mysterious occurrences at Greenloop, guided by entries from a found journal that belonged to one of its inhabitants, Kate Holland, and rounded out by interviews with witnesses of the site after the massacre. “I’ve always loved forensic horror,” Brooks says. “For me, the scariest moment of Aliens is when they get to the colony, even before they’re attacked. Devolution is a new version of the lost colony of Roanoke, Virginia. To me, that’s very terrifying.”

The oldest and youngest characters at Greenloop are Mostar, an elderly woman who survived the late 20th-century Balkan Wars, and Palomino, a girl adopted by her two mothers from a Bangladeshi orphanage. Mostar and Palomino seem to be the only characters prepared for the horror that arrives at Greenloop. Brooks agrees: “Exactly. They know how bad things can get, as opposed to everyone else who is living in a bubble and simply can’t believe it can get that bad.”

Kate’s husband, Dan, is an urban-bubble guy: no direction, addicted to the internet, a huge chip on his shoulder. Brooks admits that he grew up inside a similar version of that bubble in west Los Angeles, even with all his parents’ powerful stories from the past. “It took me a long time to find out what the world was really like,” he says. When he finally did, he was ready to imagine how easily the bubble could burst.

“It took me a long time to find out what the world was really like.”

Reading about Kate’s (d)evolution into a person who confronts the ravenous sasquatch on her own terms is so exciting, so devastating, so delightful, it doesn’t even matter if Bigfoot really exists. By the way, Brooks says, the jury is still out on that question.

“I’m just exorcising my own fears,” he says. “I’m scared of zombies, and I had a lot of questions. If there was a real zombie plague, how would it really go down? And if Sasquatch was real, how would it exist? I’m always just answering my own questions.”