Yeti Left Home (Rosenburg)

Yeti Left Home
by Aaron Rosenberg (2023)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

This was an ebook I purchased in a Kickstarter from eSpec Books, which also published my book In A Flash 2020. As a supporter of this book, my name appears in a list in the closing pages.

As silly as it sounds, many of these Kickstarter books go into the electronic TBR pile. I have a directory of them on my hard drive. Between my book club selections, holiday reading (whichever holiday) and older books already in my Kindle app, I sometimes go back and upload stories and books, usually starting with the shortest, looking for some quick reads. (This means I read more short stories, but then I read more authors, too.)

Happily, Yeti Left Home is from this year, so I'm not too far behind with this one.

First, side note, I told Danielle (Ackley McPhail, of eSpec Books) at a convention that the sequel should be called "Yeti Persisted". She laughed but it's not going to happen.

The story: Wylie Kang is an unassuming Yeti who desires nothing more than his isolated cabin in Embarass, Minnesota, with his reclining chair, his big screen TV and a cold breeze coming in through the window. He pays for this by catching and selling fish in town. One night, Wylie starts having dreams about running though the woods and attacking campers. He wakes up with leaves and twigs in his fur and hands, and no way of explaining it. Worse, he hears that campers were actually killed.

And, worst, a Hunter is looking for him. Hunters trap cryptids like him.

Wylie packs his chair and TV into his pickup and flees his cabin to lay low for a while. He drives all the way to Minneapolis and finds a motel, paying cash out of a coffee tin. He has a drivers license but little else.

While walking around the city, he gets pickpocketed, but the culprit is caught by a Red Cap who recognizes Wylie as something special. This fellow, Knox, takes Wylie under his wing, so to speak, and gets him settled into an apartment that will be cheaper in the long run than the motel, even if he's only staying in the city for a week. The apartment is owned by another supernatural being, and Knox introduces him to more.

Of particular interest are Brea, the Ogress, who is keeping an eye on Wylie to make sure that he isn't any trouble, and Sinead, a Banshee who tended to keep to herself before meeting Wylie. Brea suggests Wylie go to docks to look for work, and Sinead gives him directions.

Once at the docks, Wylie is immediately popular after preventing an accident that might've led to a bad injury, and because he's great at the job of lifting and hauling, even though it exhausted even a yeti like him, but in a good way. He's also popular because he puts an end to the shakedown from a protection racket. His coworkers are so grateful that they give him the heads up that there's a woman looking for him.

Note that his coworkers don't know what he is. They just think he's a big, hairy guy who can lift a lot.

He's finally caught by the Hunter but tells her that he'll find the actual killer, and the "scooby" gang is off to work.

As one can imagine, the Yeti didn't leave home. He's found one.

A quick, enjoyable read with a lot of cool characters all getting along.