Is Bigfoot real? A new book dives deep into the legend

My obsession with literature exploded in my early teens. Back then, my diet consisted mostly of whatever classics I could find, novels by Jules Verne, poetry by Mario Benedetti, and a lot of horror novels by Stephen King, Richard Laymon, and Bentley Little — all of which I was arguably way too young to be reading.

Then I discovered cryptozoology and went down a rabbit hole, consuming anything I could find about cryptids like Nessie,mokèlé-mbèmbé, and the chupacabras as well as animals that had jumped from cryptozoology) and the coelacanth. My favorite cryptid? Bigfoot. Books, documentaries shot with a $12 budget, shaky footage online; I couldn't get enough. I wanted to know more about it, but also about the folks who swore it was real, the people who had seen it, the devout researchers who spent countless nights out in the middle of woods looking for the famous creature I'd seen in the Patterson-Gimlin film (which is, along with the Zapruder film, probably one of the most scrutinized pieces of footage in history).