Cryptids in the Catskills

Remember what I said about pacing myself with these books? Well, fuck that shit. On to book 3, which picks up shortly after book 2 ends.

At the end of book 2, one of the soldiers, before he died, sent a bunch of classified documents to his sister via email, spilling all the details of these covert operations. His sister, you see, is a reporter, and she wants to find out what happened to her brother. The files she received are fantastical as well as frightening, and if these creatures really exist, she wants to be the one to tell the world about them. Everybody's heard of Bigfoot, and just about everybody knows somebody who claims to have encountered one, but there's no evidence that they exist. So she ends up recruiting Archer, an FBI agent who survived the assault, to lead her and a small team into the area. Archer is reluctant to do it, 1. because he barely made it out with his life, and 2. the area is locked down pending cleanup and retrieval. He's convinced to take her in, but he is tasked with keeping her away from "Ground Zero."

The first thing you notice with this one is the body count isn't as high as in the previous two books. Why? Because we're dealing with a smaller team here. But also it's because the focus is on the creatures themselves. All along, they've been considered dumb animals, a type of mountain gorilla, but it turns out they're more intelligent than anybody has given them credit for, and they actually have an organized society. They have their own language, their own ceremonies, they mourn and bury their dead. In short, they're more like us than anybody wanted to believe. Archer's attitude toward the creatures changes once he realizes that the creatures were only defending what they thought of as theirs. Outsiders were invading their home, and they killed to defend it. The book then divides into two camps: Archer and his team, who set out to prove that the creatures should be spared and allowed to live their lives and that man needs to stay out of their domain, and the military, who wants revenge for all the soldiers that were lost.

It's interesting to see that the author attempts to create an organized and intelligent society for these creatures, thus making them sympathetic, although I feel he takes it a bit far with Hector and Betty. You need to read it to find out what I'm talking about. It becomes a case of who are the real monsters here.

While I enjoyed this one, I did come away from it a little disappointed. When I read these types of books, I'm always looking for a fast-paced thrill with a high body count, and that's not what I got here, but what I did get held my interest. It was a fitting way to end the series, BUT I knew there was a Book 4, so I was interested to see where the author was going to take the story next. And just a side note... My interest in these books is primarily because of the subject matter. I go coo-coo for killer cryptids, but as a native NYer, I also have a fascination with books that take place within the five boroughs. This series, while not set in the city proper, takes place in upstate NY, specifically in the Catskill Mountains, and interestingly enough, when I was younger and well into my mid teens, we had a summer house in the Catskills. At that age, one of my dream jobs was to be a cryptozoologist, and I had dreams of camping out, looking for Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, the Yeti and a host of other cryptids, and while I knew Bigfoot sightings were primarily in the Pacific Northwest, but I had often wondered if there had ever been sightings in and around where we had the summer house.