Carnal hunger! Horny Bigfoot has a long pedigree going back to the original "Sasquatch" people of British Columbia, who were said to abduct mates from neighboring tribes, and as Bigfoot evolved into a subhuman apeman in the '50s he kept his lust for human women, as can be attested by a multitude of stories from Men's Adventure magazines. The fine folks at The Men's Adventure Library have collected an indispensable volume of classic stories about Bigfoot, Yeti, and other cryptozoological monsters:
These stories were an ephemeral connection in the web of Bigfoot mythology, mostly forgotten until The Men's Adventure Library came along. Bask in this small representative gallery of horny Bigfoot taken from their Cryptozoology Anthology:
Suffice to say, Bigfoot smut is part and parcel of Bigfoot at large, which brings us to today's novel. A mountain man finds something unbelievable in a wilderness cave: bones, massive bones. Bones too fresh to be prehistoric, too massive to be human. The only thing he can take along is a gigantic molar, but it's enough. It's proof! Meanwhile, one special Bigfoot is having a crisis of consciousness in a mountain valley. Her name is Self, and she's starting to realize that she thinks, therefore she is. She's also starting to get some ideas about all the funny business going around the Bigfoot family unit, as Big Male chooses mates without regard to how any of the Bigfoot ladies feel. The Old One and Giver of Milk both say she should accept this as the way things are, but Self is already groping her way down a whole new path of being.
Like I said, horny Bigfoot is nothing new, but it's rare to see lady Bigfoot's perspective. Self makes for an engaging character. The same can't be said for the humans - "pink skins" as Self and her family call them - who organize a trek to bag a live Bigfoot. Sheldon loses his grace with these characters and their paint-by-numbers trials, which is just too bad. There's a lot of promise in the setup but the big Bigfoot action never quite arrives. Really, it's not the humans' story at all, which is fine, we might as well just jettison their deadweight!
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| How embarrassing! |
This was Walter J. Sheldon's only novel after a career of SF short stories in the '50s. Still, I'm glad I read it. For a fair cop at a horny Bigfoot thriller, The Beast earns two massive molars out of four:
A Fawcett Gold Medal Book, 1980
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