The Bigfoot Files: 07/19/19

The Bigfoot Files by Lindsay Eagar is a middle grade novel about a daughter trying to get her mother to stop her fruitless quest to track Big Foot and other cryptids. They are running out of money and she's missed too many days at school.

Miranda Cho has agreed to go on one more trip to Northern California with her mother. She's also invited the reality TV show that her mother has wanted to be on. She hopes they'll be able to show her that Big Foot isn't real and that she is delusional.

It doesn't take long for things to get off track. The van runs out of gas. They go for help. After a series of strange events — some which might actually have happened — and some that are clearly in the mother's mind, they end up off road and lost.

In terms of the road narrative spectrum, this comes in at a 339966: a family going through the wildlands via an offroad route. Interestingly, the further from civilization, the further from the road they go, the more fantastical their encounters become. At the very end of their journey, when they have gone down a river, through a cave, and into an unknown wildland, it's there that they spot big foot.

The inclusion of Big Foot at the close of a fairly realistic fiction narrative is fairly typical of the Big Foot fiction I've read. See Lemons by Melissa Savage, for example.

But for the road narrative spectrum, especially for a position centrally located in the realistic end of the spectrum, it's unusual for the narrative to veer into fantasy. It's an example of the flexibility of the road narrative spectrum. Position while it correlates with certain kinds of genres, doesn't predict or cause a certain kind of genre.

Four stars

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