A RATHER FISHY BUSINESS

Mark A. Hall, Loren Coleman, David Goudsward. Merbeings: The True Story of Mermaids, Merman and Lizardfolk. Anomalist Books, 2023.

This is a very strange book. The 'True Story' of the varied crypto-creatures covered in this book is - largely I think in Mark Hall's view rather than the two other contributors - that they are scale-and-tail, fully evolved real animals. And not just animals, but primates, in fact our sea-going cousins.

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DOWN BELOW

Nick Redfern. Monsters of the Deep. Visible Ink, 2021.

Nick Redfern is a reliable chronicler of Fortean mysteries and natural oddities. Although he is open to imaginative speculation – in this book for instance presenting a semi-plausible physiology for fire-breathing dragons – he is careful to also offer more mundane explanations for the stranger observations. 

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WATCH THE SKIES

T. S. Mart and Mel Cabre. A Guide to Sky Monsters: Thunderbirds, the Jersey Devil, Mothman, and Other Flying Cryptids. Red Lightning Books, 2021.

Winged cryptids are a mainstay of forteana, and appear in may guises across the world. This book concentrates initially on American examples, but offers more than just a basic listing and description of various crypto-species.

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SEARCHING FOR FELINE PHANTOMS

Karl P. N. Shuker. Mystery Cats of the World Revisited. Anomalist Books, 2020.

This book is described as a revision and update of the author’s earlier book, Mystery Cats of the World, published in 1989, but in many respects this volume is an entirely new work. In his introduction the author explains that in revising the content, he has concentrated primarily on the wealth of new reports and information that has come from Africa, Asian and South America, where there have been many reports of entirely new feline cryptids. 

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TAILS OF THE SEA

Vaughn Scribner. Merpeople, A Human History. Reaktion Books, 2020.

I think it could be a good idea for people to start reading Merpeople at Chapter Three, and as a mental exercise going through it substituting for the word ‘mermaid’ the letters 'UFO'. Some readers might think that mermaids are entirely fictional and fantasy characters, and unlike other Fortean topics, could never have been considered as actual, physical creatures. This book shows just how wrong that idea is. 

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PICTURING MONSTERS

Heather Frigiola. Monsters and Mythical Creatures from Around the World. Red Feather, 2019. 

This is not really a book for the serious cryptozoologist, but it would certainly make a fine present for someone with an interest in the strange fauna that inhabit the Fortean regions of human myth and imagination. It is clearly intended as a ‘gift book’, with its antiqued pages and bright illustrations, but none the worse for that. 

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SEEING SEA SERPENTS ON THE SEA SHORE

David Goudsward. Sun, Sand, and Sea Serpents. Anomalist Books, 2020.

I have to admit that cryptozoology is not my favourite aspect of Forteana. Too much of the published literature is either intrepid explorers hacking their way through jungles in search of some cryptid which they never seem to find, or just ‘interesting-if-true’ trawls through the journals of earlier travellers, or the seldom-explored reaches of newspaper files. But this book is quite different.
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DEVIL OF A TALE

Brian Regal and Frank J. Esposito. The Secret History of the Jersey Devil; How Quakers, Hucksters and Benjamin Franklin Created a Monster. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.

Although its fame is not quite as universal as the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot, the Jersey Devil can claim to be by far the senior mystery monster. Haunting the Pine Barrens, an isolated wooded area of New Jersey, the Jersey Devil is usually described as a goat-or horse-like creature, usually walking on its hind legs, with bat-like wings growing from its withers.
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MONSTER MASH

Jason Offutt. Chasing American Monsters. Llewellyn, 2019.

No-one reading this book should be expecting a critical scientific survey of cryptozoological phenomena in the USA. That’s not what it’s for, it’s a rollicking read of accounts of encounters with the weirder denizens, or in many cases, pseudo-denizen, of the 50 states.

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OUT OF THE SHADOWS

Michael Mayes. Shadow Cats, The Black Panthers of North America. Anomalist Books. 2018.

For the last fifteen years the author, Michael Mayes, has investigated animals that may not exist (cryptids), and ‘Shadow Cats’ or Black Panthers fall into that category. In this very interesting book, he admits that, according to mainstream science, there is no such animal, but in turn he gives vast information and data to the contrary. 

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GEF BEEN IN?

Christopher Josiffe. Gef! The Strange Tale of an Extra-special Talking Mongoose. Strange Attractor Press, 2017.

Near the beginning of this book one mystery is cleared up. Our hero’s name is pronounced with a soft ‘g’ - as ‘Jeff’, short for Geoffrey. Unfortunately this is about the only part of the mongoose mystery which we can solve conclusively, as everything else about the creature is entirely ambiguous, and all the more interesting for that.

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AVOIDING THE TRAPS

Darren Naish. Hunting Monsters: Cryptozoology and the Reality Behind the Myths. Arcturus, 2017.

As a boy, palaeontologist and zoologist Darren Naish became interested in cryptid creatures, and thought that in time decisive evidence for their existence would be found. This has not happened and he has now come to the conclusion that while there are no doubt new animal species to be discovered, these do not include the headline want-lists of cryptozoologists.
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INTO THE MAGIC FOREST

Lyle Blackburn. Beyond Boggy Creek: In Search of The Southern Sasquatch Anomalist Books, 2017.

Tales of hairy humanoids in North America have traditionally been associated with the forests of British Columbia, Oregon, Washington and Northern California but actually they are reported from all over the country and in this book Lyle Blackburn looks at those coming from the Deep South.
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MONSTER ROUND-UP

Malcolm Robinson. The Monsters of Loch Ness (The History and the Mystery) lulu.com, 2016.

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Karl N. P. Shuker. Here’s Nessie: A Monstrous Compendium from Loch Ness. CFZ Press, 2016.

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Nick Redfern. Nessie: Exploring the Supernatural Origins of the Loch Ness Monster. Llewellyn, 2016.

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Denver Michaels. Water Monsters South of the Border. CreateSpace, 2016.

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Ken Gerhard. A Menagerie of Mysterious Beasts: Encounters With Cryptid Creatures. Llewellyn, 2016.
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FIRST READ - DEEP WATERS

Tim Dinsdale. Loch Ness Monster. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961.

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Maurice Burton. The Elusive Monster: An Analysis of the Evidence From Loch Ness. Rupert Hart-Davis, 1961.

Nessie would have been 80 this year if she had still be around as a living legend, but of all the old standard Fortean phenomena she is the one that has been most comprehensively debunked, mainly by the combined efforts of Ronald Binns, Steuart Campbell, Adrian Shine and Christopher Spurling. #

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BEAST

Sánchez Romero and S.R. Schwalb. Beast: Werewolves, Serial Killers and Man-Eaters, the Mystery of the Monsters of the Gévaudan. Skyhorse Publishing, 2016. 

During the period 1764 to 1767 a series of horrific attacks occurred in the remote Gévaudan region of France. The victims, numbering in excess of one hundred, consisted mostly of women and children who were subjected to a frenzied assault that often resulted in the dismemberment of the body.
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THE ART OF THE MONSTER

Christopher Dell. Monsters: A Bestiary of the Bizarre. Thames and Hudson, 2016.

This is a typical Thames and Hudson production, a lovingly assembled collection of images with a minimum of discussion, which would probably be superfluous. The illustrations are all more than a century old, so there are no depictions of modern monsters such as Bigfoot, Chupacabra and Mothman.
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SKATING ON THIN ICE

Bernard Heuvelmans.   Neanderthal: The Strange Story of the Minnesota Iceman. Translated by Paul LeBlond, afterword by Loren Coleman.  Anomalist Books, 2016.

The story of the Minnesota Iceman, an alleged hairy humanoid displayed in a block of ice by a carnival grafter Frank Hansen in 1968 is perhaps one of the oddest in cryptozoology, not least because the overwhelming probability that the thing was a fake.
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DISCOMFORTING CREATURES

Theresa Bane. Encyclopedia of Beasts and Monsters in Myth, Legend and Folklore. McFarland, 2016.

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Theresa Bane. Encyclopedia of Giants and Humanoids in Myth, Legend and Folklore. McFarland, 2016.

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Theresa Bane. Encyclopedia of Spirits and Ghosts in World Mythology. McFarland, 2016.

To use a tired old phrase, these three books do exactly what it says on the tin. They are comprehensive alphabetical encyclopedias of creatures of vision and belief, taken from an extraordinary range of societies and historical periods.
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HUNTING THE BIGFOOT HUNTERS

Joe Gisondi. Monster Trek: The Obsessive Search for Bigfoot. University of Nebraska Press, 2016.

Joe Gisondi, a journalist and professor of journalism at Eastern Illinois University, had a childhood interest in Bigfoot, and now has set out to explore not so much the beast itself, as the people who investigate it. He went on expeditions and treks in eight locations in Oklahoma, North Carolina, Illinois, Florida, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Ohio and Wyoming.
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