Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice-for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. This eclectic style of storytelling provides just enough information to follow the developing events, while the reader grasps for the crucial information that will solve the mystery of the enigmatic children.Īn engaging thriller with clues that will keep you guessing.Īre we not men? We are-well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).Ī zombie apocalypse is one thing. Lotz tells the story through a fabricated nonfiction book within the novel called Black Thursday: From Crash to Conspiracy: Inside the Phenomenon of The Three, written by the fictional Elspeth Martins, who says she's pieced together an amalgam of email messages, interviews, articles, online chat forums and memoirs. While the media hounds the survivors' families, politicians exploit the public's apocalyptic fears to take domestic and foreign policy in a new direction. In the U.S., the hysteria is brought to a head by a fundamentalist preacher who sees the children as the harbingers of the End Times referenced in the book of Revelation.

When the children are returned to their families, they seem different somehow, and they become the focus of rumors ranging from alien activity to paranormal messaging. As if that weren't frightening enough, the drama is intensified when the public learns about the cryptic last message of a woman who died on one of the planes and the odd coincidence that in three of the crashes, a single child survived. 12, 2012, when four planes crash within hours of each other on different continents. South African screenwriter Lotz’s new thriller revolves around the fictitious events of 'Black Thursday,' Jan. Lone survivors from different plane crashes spark apocalyptic fears.

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