He heads up to clean out the gutters on the roof. “Injury turns you from a giver to a taker,” another inhabitant adds.Ĭut to spring 2020 and Brooks is in lockdown at home with his wife, Michelle Kholos (“the greatest playwright in the world!”) and their teenage son, Henry. The novel is largely told through the journal of Kate, one of the community’s inhabitants, and in one scene she warns her partner, Dan, against cleaning the solar panels on their roof, because she’s worried he’ll hurt himself. It tells the story of an eco-community that is cut off from the outside world after a volcano erupts, and that is only the start of their problems. Despite its title, Devolution has nothing to do with Scottish political independence, “and I’ll do a Scottish apology tour if it’s a problem, from the Outer Hebrides to Hadrian’s Wall,” he says. Nonetheless, he even scared himself when he predicted a day in his own life. I thought World War Z was a really cool movie that happened to have the same title of a book I once wrote Really deep state: turning on CNN and watching Wuhan getting locked down,” he says dryly. The video has been watched more than 16m times. But if I give it to him, he could give it to Carl Reiner, who can give it to Dick Van Dyke, and before I know it, I’ve wiped out a whole generation of comedic legends,” says Brooks, pointing to his father behind a glass door and listing his closest friends. “If I get the coronavirus, I’ll probably be OK. He enlisted the help of the oldest person in his life, his father, comedy god, Mel Brooks. On 16 March, when most people in the western world were barely getting to grips with the lockdown, he made a video about the importance of social distancing to protect the elderly. He certainly saw the coronavirus coming long before most politicians, and was making preparations in January. He has the jittery energy of the chronically anxious, and the easy confidence of one who has been thoroughly validated.
So if I’m the smartest guy in the room, we’re in big trouble,” he tells me over Skype from his home in Los Angeles (our interview was in May, before the national protests after the killing of George Floyd, but well after lockdown started.).
The history of pandemics tends to come in extremely predictable cycles. But Brooks, 47, is dismissive of the hyperbole: “Everything I write about has already happened. His 2006 novel, World War Z, was about a deadly virus originating in China that causes global devastation, and his compulsive new one, Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Sasquatch Massacre, is about people forced into self-isolation, huddling in terror from an unimaginable threat outside. An author with cult appeal and massive sales, he is regularly referred to as “a soothsayer” and “a genius”. M ax Brooks is getting a little tired of being proved right.
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