I am a child of myths. My maternal grandmother passed down stories from her Greek village of ancient goddesses and epic revolutionary heroines. On the other side of my family, I learned the American-made tall tales of Paul Bunyan and his big blue ox, lumbering across the Great Lakes on their adventures.
And then there’s Bigfoot: an American myth so ubiquitous it’s hard to remember when or where I first heard it. Bigfoots are part of our national character, whether we believe in them or not.
Halfway through Giano Cromley’s fantastical, heartfelt debut novel, “American Mythology,” the young documentarian Vicky Xu muses that Bigfoot is “less about what’s out there, and more about what’s inside each of us.” She’s in the Montana woods, following the expedition of lifelong friends Jute and Vergil on their quest to prove the existence of Bigfoot, with all the spooky nighttime shenanigans that accompany it. But in Cromley’s novel, what lies within each of these characters is just as exceptional as what might be hiding in the wilderness.
Vergil is deciding when to reveal heavy personal news that will upend the lives of his oldest friend and his college-age daughter. Jute is trying to make sense of his own father’s disappearance years earlier, and the strange things he witnessed on their final trip to a remote off-trail lake in the Elkhorn Mountains. Their unlikely fellow expeditioner Dr. Marcus Bernard—a professor of evolutionary biology and the country’s foremost expert on the “possibly mythical North American wood ape”—may be plotting how to revoke his Bigfoot card once and for all, to the detriment of all involved.
As they travel deeper into the Montana back country, these personal journeys keep the novel grounded, even as their Bigfoot search uncovers strange occurrences that defy rational explanation. Otherworldly cries and massive thermal signatures in the night. Oversized prints and misshapen stick-figure offerings by day. A large black crow seems to follow them and observe the proceedings—but it can’t be the same crow Jute recalls from that fated trip with his father decades earlier. Or can it? Cromley deftly walks the line between the real and the mythical for most of this journey, and I loved inhabiting that space with his characters.
Woven throughout the novel are excerpts from a mysterious journal of those who explored the Elkhorn Mountains previously, dating back to a group of trappers harvesting pelts in 1853 who faced unseen, malevolent forces near the hidden lake Jute visited as a child. The journal eventually winds up in the hands of one of the present-day Bigfoot expeditioners, who attempts to connect contemporary evidence to this epistolary history. It was ominous and intriguing, and the journal provides readers a glimpse into the uncanny experiences other travelers faced, but I wished there hadn’t been such a clean resolution of the document’s origin and purpose. So much of this story draws its strength from the unknown.
Throughout “American Mythology,” Cromley keeps readers reaching for answers alongside the motley expedition crew, anticipating a big reveal with Bigfoot in the woods (or an inevitable letdown). Without giving anything away, the ending is both magical and deeply meaningful for Jute and Vergil, reminding readers that their enduring friendship has been at the center of this tale all along.
This is a novel for anyone who delights in myths old or new—their bold claims of what might be possible in our world, and what they reveal about the magic of the everyday.
“American Mythology”
By Giano Cromley
Doubleday, 304 pages
