The protagonist of this novel, Big Jim Foote, is part of the bigfoot community that lives near Morgantown, West Virginia, and is also a private investigator among humans who must not know that he is a bigfoot. Involved in two murder investigations, he hopes neither murder was perpetrated by his bigfoot kin, some of whom are involved in the opioid epidemic. “Family, folklore, and mountain folk culture all play starring roles in this cryptozoological conundrum that delights and entertains at every twist of the trail.” - Southern Review of Books. “Part mystery, part fable but all original, Jim Foote is sure to be one of your favorite literary detectives—cryptid or otherwise.” —Jordan Farmer. “The first thing to say about Foote is that it is a strange and seemingly untenable hybrid of bigfoot fantasy and detective novel noir; the second is that its matter-of-fact voice and deeply authentic setting in the hollows of West Virginia render every part of the story perfectly real and entirely (marvelously) ordinary. This is a novel that uses moonshine heritage to delve into the modern opioid epidemic, and a novel that asks about the meaning of ‘otherness’ while reminding us what it means to be human. I fell into this book and loved it from the first page.” - Molly Gloss. The author, Tom Bredehoft, is a retired English professor whose specialized in Medieval literature He lives in Morgantown, West Virginia.
Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2022. 244 pages. Trade paperback.