Sasquatch: Monster of the Northwest Woods

by M.E. Knerr

Death in the snow.

Out there in the snowy silence of the woods a monster was on the prowl, a massive, hairy creature nearly ten feet tall, with terrible hooked claws and eyes like burning coals. Sasquatch, Big Foot - the names meant the same thing.

The first body they found had no head, and the others were even more horribly mutilated. Finally a loner named Russ McChord loaded his rifle and went after the Sasquatch.

It was man against monster in a fight to the finish.

Genres: Horror

233 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published December 1, 1978

Reviews

[Grady Hendrix · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nice violent Bigfoot action but not much of a book. Mostly people sleeping with each other and trying to figure out if it’s Bigfoot who's suddenly turned into an anti-gun activist or maybe just a really angry deer.

[Quentin Wallace · Rating 3 out of 5]

This paperback from the late 1970s falls into what I call the "Paperback from Hell" genre, taken from the book of the same name. The 70s and 80s were a golden age for nutty horror paperbacks, and I would say this is one of them. It's not nearly as crazy as nazi leprechauns, but it's still an odd duck.

The main issue with this is the lack of Sasquatch. Maybe 25% of the book deals with the sasquatch, and the rest deals with peoples personal relationships and affairs. And since we don't really have much time to meet the characters, it feels weird to hear about their relationship problems when we didn't even know they had relationships.

Overall this was just what you'd expect if you've read any books from this type from the time period. Worth a read, but a guilty pleasure at best.

[Mark Heber · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed it 30 years ago and I enjoyed it this week. A good, convincing monster yarn from the late 70's.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

My crippling addiction to awful animal attack horror novels usually doesn't cross over into the supernatural or mythical realm, but hell, Bigfoot's basically just a big angry monkey, that's close enough for me to take a punt on this.

Early on I thought I was onto a real winner here. The standard of the writing in these sorts of things in never particularly high, but in Sasquatch it's actually pretty solid. The opening sequence of a trapper being stalked though the woods by an unseen presence (spoilers: it's a big angry monkey) is great, and things remain strong for the first few chapters. Above average prose, a few exciting action scenes, a decent enough cast of characters, what could go wrong?

Unfortunately, it's at this point the book just sort of stops. Bigfoot is sidelined in favour of exploring the psychology of our protagonist, a throwback cowboy with no place in the modern world. It's not terrible, it's just very on the nose stuff, hammering us over the head with the parallels between him and the Bigfoot. It also spends time setting up something of a knock-off Jaws trio, with an out-of-towner police chief, a biologist and our anti-social woodsman hero, but the book somehow feels like it spends far too much time on setting these guys up while simultaneously feeling like all it's given us is cardboard cutouts, because there's no depth to any of them. On top of that the three aren't even all in the same place at the same time until literally the last couple of pages. If you're going to knockoff Jaws, at least steal the best part and play up the dynamics between them.

Big "when are they gonna get to the fireworks factory" vibes, basically. You've got workman like prose, which is better than can be said for most of the genre, so scenes out in the woods absolutely shine, but they're too few and far between for the book to be satisfying as a whole.

Cover is an absolute all timer, though.