Something big, fearsome and hairy is on a killing spree in the forests of eastern Snohomish County.
No, it’s not Paul Bunyan’s axe-wielding grandson or the Scottish Highland cows, of late wreaking havoc in Granite Falls.
It’s a psychic Sasquatch – a bloodthirsty Bigfoot – ticked off because a group of careless campers unleashed a wildfire that wiped out his mate, offspring and entire tribe.
Yes, revenge is a dish best served hairy.
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That’s the backdrop for Matthew Scott Hansen’s debut novel, “The Shadow Killer,” a new 436-page Bigfoot-detective book published by Simon &Schuster.
Hansen lived in Seattle on and off for nearly two decades and knows Snohomish County.
“Bigfoot has been treated like a joke,” said Hansen, who first became interested in the concept of a great North American ape as a child growing up in Eugene, Ore.
Yet there’s nothing funny about Hansen’s fictional incarnation of the creature: a cunning 10-foot- 5-inch, 1,400-pound hominid that can sense the emotions and thoughts of his prey – the little two-legged “keepers of the fire.”
Nor is there anything amusing about some of the thriller’s other characters: a software tycoon who goes batty trying to prove Bigfoot’s existence and an older American Indian actor who discovers a mystical, extra-sensory link to the beast.
The author chose Snohomish, where his sister lives, as the setting for the novel. His parents live in Lake Stevens.
“Snohomish County sits astride both civilization and the wilds and seemed like a great stage for this story,” Hansen said.
He named the book’s fictional newspaper the Snohomish Daily News, and he set scenes around the county and peppered them with familiar references: Weyerhaeuser, Gold Bar, Sultan.
Tammy Domike, manager of Seattle Mystery Bookshop, said she is about halfway done with “The Shadow Killer.”
Domike, who grew up on 220 acres of forested property in the community of Roy, south of Tacoma, said Hansen “really gets the woods.”
“I am so loving it. It’s just a hoot,” she said of the new book. “I’m intellectually aware that Bigfoot doesn’t exist, but it’s easy to suspend that with this book.”
While the story is fiction, Hansen, who now lives in Southern California, said he thinks it could be true.
Largely ignored by mainstream book reviewers, “The Shadow Killer” has become a hit on the Internet with Bigfoot groups, such as the Gulf Coast Bigfoot Research Organization.
In a review posted on the group’s Web site, Hansen is praised for taking “great care to fill in the finer details … that (are) so often overlooked.”
Hansen reviewed Bigfoot sightings and samples collected by anthropologists while writing the book.
He also became familiar with some American Indian tribes that incorporate into their mythologies a large manlike creature said to walk the forest floor.
The Bigfoot legend dates back centuries among North American Indians.
Some call the beast Sasquatch, Oh-Mah, Se-At-Tik, Tsunoqua or numerous other names.
The Tulalip tribes have a story about Sway-Uock, a towering woman who came out of the woods to the beach and snatched up all the children she could fit into her massive basket.
The roots of stories about a gigantic creature are here, said David Dilgard, a regional historian with the Everett Public Library.
Many American Indian story poles in the Northwest featured representations of a creature that is neither man nor beast, Hansen said.
“I think so many people disbelieve that Bigfoot exists because it would be such a fantastic notion that we have a cousin that we don’t know anything about,” he said.
Famed primatologist Jane Goodall has said she believes Bigfoot could exist.
So did Idaho state anatomist Jeff Meldrum, who has collected more than 200 casts of what he believes could be Bigfoot footprints.
Hansen said those, and many more voices, lend credibility to the possibility that Bigfoot exists.
“You put a gun to my head and say ‘Does this thing exist?’ ” he said. “No. But there is really good evidence out there that it does.”
Reporter David Chircop: 425-339-3429 or dchircop@heraldnet.com.
About the book
The story of “The Shadow Killer” follows fictional Snohomish County Sheriff’s Detective Mac Schneider, who is sent to investigate the disappearance of two hotshot attorneys.
The detective, described as an investigator at the top of his game, comes across a giant footprint. At first he thinks the clue is part of an elaborate hoax.
But as more people begin to vanish, and more footprints emerge, he becomes convinced the killer isn’t human.
The story also features a ruthlessly ambitious Seattle television reporter who cares more about fame than truth and who romances her way to scoops on the killings.
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