What has piercing eyes, a terrible smell, an enormous dong, and it stretches all your shoes out of shape? That would be Bigfoot, America's favorite manimal. Before the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film, Bigfoot was a Northwestern wood ape, just a regional oddity that didn't yet have a hold on the national consciousness. Of far more interest to the world was Yeti, the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas, but when Life magazine scrapped their plans to run a feature on the Patterson-Gimlin film after the American Museum of Natural History proclaimed it a hoax, men’s adventure pulp, Argosy, licensed the footage and ran it into the ground. Their first Bigfoot cover proclaimed our adorable hairball "California's Abominable Snowman" and soon they were running near-constant Bigfoot coverage next to articles like “A Modern City-Born Captain Cook Explores the Topless Fijis,” and "Is YOUR Dog Psychic?"
In short order, Bigfoot became a staple of non-fiction Fortean paperbacks, but it wasn't until February, 1976 that Bigfoot fiction began to appear in the wake of The Six Million Dollar Man two-parter, “The Secret of Bigfoot,” in which Steve Austin de-armed Sasquatch (played by Andre the Giant) discovering that the beast was a bionic watchdog for some local aliens. Berkley published the novelization of the Six Million Dollars Man episode, The Six Million Dollar Man and the Secret of Bigfoot, in 1976, unleashing a veritable herd of bigfoot fiction that stampeded across bookstore racks between 1977 and 1984. There are only about a dozen bigfoot novels, but they have a clear message: Bigfoot is not a danger to man, but his penis definitely is. Also, he has piercing eyes. And he smells bad. And did I mention his penis?
Some Bigfoot books aren't about Bigfoot at all, but about the Abominable Snowman. Norman Bogner’s Snowman (1977) gives us an Abominable Snowman who, in a cruel twist of fate, hates snow. He also hates light, noise, humans, animals...pretty much everything, especially after he hitches a ride to California on a passing iceberg and begins decapitating people, starting with Miss Great Northern Resort Snow Queen 1977 while she takes ski lessons.
This Abominable Snowman bears only scant resemblance to Bigfoot. He’s 20 feet tall, leaves shimmering rainbow-colored footprints and pentagram-shaped wounds, he can imitate the sound of other animals, including the cry of a human female in distress — he’s basically something an eleven-year-old boy would dream up during math class. The only two ways he’s a recognizable forebear to fictional Bigfeet to come are the power of his eyes (they shoot heat beams), and his penchant for decapitation.
Peter Tremayne’s Snowbeast (1983) delivers another Abominable Snowman, this one a red-headed Scot, who is a pathetic specimen. For over 100 pages all it does is cry and scuffle. Heard only at great distances, it makes a cry that was “curiously like the wail of a human baby" alongside a full orchestration of "cries", "keening", a "far-off wail", "scrabbling", and "scuffling." A mob of local sheepherders are able to track this emo Yeti by the sound of its crybaby crying but when they finally corner it in its lair they find it in lotus position, meditating while broadcasting a telepathic message of “om…om…the root mantra of creation…We are the contemplators, the meditators; we exist, what else is there but to exist and to be one with nature?...om...om...om..."
Then an avalanche kills them all.
Fucking hippies.
Unfortunately, American Bigfoot turns out to be a hippie, too. In 1977's Nights with Sasquatch, a supposedly true account written by John Cotter and Judith Frankel about their sexy experiences with Bigfoot, Judith is a “perfect specimen of the modern female, able to handle sophisticated lab data and lecherous young men with equal ease” but she’s not able to handle an old-fashion cuddlebear like Bigfoot, who abducts her while hiking in the Pacific Northwest near the Canadian border, shaming Cotter in the process with his enormous dong. Judith realizes that the only way to survive her ordeal is to seduce Bigfoot and control him with her sex scent, which she does, until Cotter comes to her rescue and blows Bigfoot’s head off. Smelly, hairy, and given to humbling "modern females" Bigfoot sounds like that toxic yoga dude with a man bun who lives in a treehouse and gave you bedbugs but also the best sex of your life.
And he hates guns! in Sasquatch: Monster of the Northwest Woods (1977) Bigfoot decapitates an old trapper in the first chapter as easily and casually as most of us open a beer. As one cowboy muses, “One swat and goodbye head.” Then Bigfoot breaks that cowboy's neck, too. But, as the local Sheriff observes, these the murders can’t be the work of Sasquatch because “Sasquatches are timid and shy.”
But this Bigfoot got shot in the head, the wound got infected, and now it attacks anything that reminds it of guns, at one point tearing away a fishing pole from an old wino's hands, jumping up and down on it in a rage. There's a lot to be said here about Bigfoot’s eyes (“...a half-dozen pair of eyes, large and greenish-yellow, moving slowly about in the darkness of the woods. They had glowed, almost like the eyes of a deer when hit by the ray of a flashlight, but there had been no light that night...The eyes floated in the darkness, moving about in the manner of animals feeding….gentle, curious eyes, glowing softly, without malice.”) and also his body odor, commenting more than once on "the strong odor that usually accompanies the Bigfoot."
Bigfoot’s eyes also take center stage in Shadow of the Beast, a book about another "modern female" scientist who is humbled not by Bigfoot’s penis but by Bigfoot’s eyes:
"His eyes were on her. His eyes were speaking to her...Its eyes were deep-set, and dark, and moist...They touched the boy, somehow. They probed him and entered him and stared at his soul...Henry stood before the creature, captured by eyes that seemed to speak, and to know, to understand. The giant did not move or blink...Ruth blinked her tears away..."
Later, someone moans, "There was no killing in the creature's eyes...I knew he couldn’t kill, not him. He’s helping us." This is Bigfoot at his most humorless, just a smelly, hairy hippie with a big dick and a telepathic vocabulary taken from self-help books ("Why am I glad? Why do I love you? Who are you? Are you the one? Who are you? Who will take care of me? Who is it? Is it you?"). Bigfoot would also humble another "modern female" scientist in The Beast which we've talked about before.
Bigfoot appeared in the Western novels Big Foot’s Range (1979) where he turns out to be a German in a fur coat, and Spectros #2: Hunt the Beast Down (1981) set in Oregon, part of a series about a wizard cowboy. Here, it’s the Bigfoot we all know and love, tearing off heads and sporting “intelligent eyes” and a distinctive odor. But the best Bigfoot of all is in Thomas Page's The Spirit (1977).
The Spirit pays lip service to the kinder gentler Bigfoot as someone in the opening pages reassures his hunting companions, “There’s absolutely no report of this thing being dangerous to anybody,” right before Bigfoot decapitates two members of the hunting party and a dog. Towards the end of the book, after Bigfoot has massacred an entire ski resort full of people, one character muses, “Bigfoot!…Ain’t that something? I thought they weren’t supposed to hurt people.” Nope.
This book’s Bigfoot sports “a detestable smell of sweat and excrement” and unlike any other Bigfeet “it whistles like a marmot.” Like Norman Bogner's, this Bigfoot has “the face of Satan...stamped onto an ape’s skull,” and it’s pretty much pissed off all the time. With a "pear-shaped" dadbod, this Bigfoot is dying out because some kind of genetic disorder means that every time it has disgusting Bigfoot sex with a Lady Bigfoot they give birth to deformed mutant offspring. In a surprising, and insulting, twist, it has a big chin and “large protuberant buttocks” which means that this Bigfoot isn't an ape…it’s Homo sapiens! That doesn't keep it from murdering pretty much everyone it can get its homo sapiens hands on. The Spirit is available in a reissue from Valancourt with a very long introduction by me.
Bigfoot fiction would lay fallow until John Tigges revived it with a vengance in 1995 with Monster which delivers Bigfoot at his most hippie-ish. As in Nights with Bigfoot, Shadow of the Beast, and The Beast, at the heart of this book is another "modern female" who must be humbled by Bigfoot's heady personal odor and enormous wiener, which Tigges introduces us to in the fourth sentence of the first paragraph of the first chapter. When he can tear his eyes away from Bigfoot's dong, Tigges describes the saddest camping trip ever: Joanna Evans and her husband, Mal, have come to pitch tent in the wilderness in order to have an open dialogue and save their marriage. Their marriage is in danger because Joanna has been sleeping around and because Mal has a “mouse-colored” beard.
Bigfoot recently lost his mate, and rather than putting an ad up and letting the ladies come to him, he abducts Joanna from camp, forcing Mal to recruit some hunters and set off in hot pursuit, tracking Bigfoot mostly by his poo:
"Dung. Someplace not too far distant, there’s a pile of Sasquatch dung. I can smell it on the breeze," one hunter intones, manfully.
They also realize that it's spring, which is mating season, and that puts a ticking clock on things as they sit around the campfire and contemplate how Bigfoot might want to bone down with Joanna.
“Peter only hoped they’d be on time to prevent such a thing from happening.”
Me, too? But Bigfoot is already bringing his A-game, making gentle "wook-a-wook" sounds, serving Joanna a variety of food he steals from campsites, and occasionally displaying The Goods:
"Its penis jerked alive and swelled until it stood erect in front of him, massive, six inches around, 14 inches long."
Eventually, Joanna can't resist Bigfoot even though she makes sure their dirty humping stays on top of her jeans, which serve as her denim chastity belt, and since it's 1995 we can only assume they look like this. But even with blue jeans in the way their love is more hard-R than PG-13 since Tigges spends a lot of time talking about the laundry problems posed by Bigfoot's, erm, discharge.
When Mal finally finds Joanna she ditches him, mostly because Bigfoot fights a grizzly bear for her, after which she grabs the wild beast by the hand and runs away into the woods with him, baseball-bat sized dorkus flapping against one of its legs. This is so upsetting that Mal gets confined to the local mental hospital where he has to listen to the guards rhapsodize about Bigfoot's peaceful nature after the news shows a photo of an eight-months pregnant Joanna running blissfully through the woods, hand-in-hand with Bigfoot.
“It may not be so bad for her,” the guard said. “The Sasquatch is not only one with the universe but with nature. He lives with the earth better than you or I.”
And all Mal can do about that is cry into his mouse-colored beard, having remembered the most essential fact about hippies: the second you let your guard down, they're going to steal your girl.