Occultober Day 27 Devil's Desk by Mark Tufo
Occultober Day 27 Devil’s Desk by Mark Tufo
If you like action, attitude, and a touch of the paranormal, you’re going to love Devil’s Desk. Mike and his wife, Tracey, join their best friends, BT and Linda, on a camping trip in the Alaskan wilderness. While they are there, a massive earthquake sinks chunks of California, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska (and presumably parts of Canada too) setting off volcanic eruptions and tsunamis that basically cut the four (and the other campers) off from civilization. That would have been bad enough. There are a lot of bizarre personalities in the campground, including a man who turns out to be a psychopathic murderer. But the group’s problems are only just beginning. Because all of the seismic activity has also drawn a clan of yeti (or maybe sasquatches) down out of the mountains, and they have quickly discovered they like the taste of human flesh.
What follows is a truly exciting adventure in which the humans try to figure out how not to get eaten while fighting continuously among themselves. BT’s wife is initially worried about harming what must be an endangered species. The college kids don’t want anyone telling them what to do. The psychopath similarly can’t play nice. BT (a cop) can’t get it through his head that this isn’t the best time to be telling the psychopath that he’ll be charged with murder when they get back to civilization. And that’s all before the extraordinary tension causes real problems to come out between the friends and their fellow survivors.
Tufo also makes the yeti actions seem highly plausible as they show they are more than animals if less than human. This low-grade intelligence makes them all the more terrifying as they tighten the noose around the humans. Things get so bad that about seventy percent of the way through the book I started wondering what the author could do with the last pages—first few chapters of another novel?—because it seemed impossible for everyone not to be dead in the next few pages. Yet, each time what happened seemed credible, even when one of the group starts lambasting the man who keeps saving them for being a killer and therefore morally inferior to the others.
There are two elements to this story that scream for a sequel without in anyway making the book less than a standalone novel. The first is the prologue. What exactly happened in the mine? Is this the true source of the yeti as I initially suspected, or is something else going on? The second is an almost throw away line which suggests that one of the group isn’t from this timeline. I suspect that Mark Tufo has a lot more instore for us. I can’t wait to read his next novel.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09...
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