"Like a bird watching guide...only for monsters."

“Last week I was in Virginia. Grayson County. I interviewed a sixteen-year-old girl who’d been assaulted by a bar hade.”

“A what?”

“A bear head. The severed head of a bear. This bar hade, see, was floating around on its own little flying saucer, looked kind of like the hubcaps on cousin Wayne’s vintage Caddy. Had red, glowing eyes like two cigar stubs and telescoping chrome antennas poking up behind its ears.” He burped.

“It assaulted her? How?”

“You don’t want to know; you’re obviously impressionable. ‘It was cold’”—he lapsed into his bad Southern accent—“‘and metallic.’ It made electronic noises. Now that is the real thing, the straight goods from the mass unconscious, friend; that little girl is a witch. There’s no place for her to function in this society. She’d have seen the devil if she hadn’t been brought up on The Bionic Woman’ and all those ‘Star Trek’ reruns. She is clued into the main vein. And she knows that it happened to her. I got out ten minutes before the heavy UFO boys showed up with the polygraph.”

William Gibson, The Gernsback Continuum

Every now and then my sister Dorothy sends me a book.  Now, as I've already said, my sister could probably write this blog (albeit a bit differently than I do) so as you might guess, she tends to send me things that relate to science fiction or fantasy.

However, she's also aware that I already have a fairly substantial stack of books, and although it's certainly not impossible to give me something that isn't there, you're certainly taking a chance if you decide to give me a book in hopes that it's something that I don't already own.

Dorothy has cleverly addressed this problem by sending me things that are a bit odd even by my liberal standards.  As an example, the most current entry in the sweepstakes is The Monster Spotter's Guide to North America, by Scott Francis.

I'll admit that I opened this book with a certain sense of sibling obligation, a sort of "Oh, well, I should give it a look" feeling.  To my surprise, I found it to be an interesting and somewhat authoritative guide to the various "hairy monsters, flying monsters, lake monsters and other unexplained phenomena" that inhabit the continent.

And it's a good solid book, 248 pages of information on creatures ranging from the obviously fictional, like the Sidehill Wampus, a hill-dwelling cat-like creature which has longer legs on one side to keep itself level, to the less explicable Lake Worth Monster, an aquatic man-beast that terrorized an entire beachful of people in Texas in 1969.  There's a plethora of serpentine lake monsters, all sorts of variations on Bigfoot, and any number of frog men*, gator men, lizard men, mud men and even skunk men.

The group term for these creatures is "cryptids" and although I'm a sceptic about these things, you do have to wonder what lies behind the innumerable cryptid sightings, encounters and in some cases attacks that are listed in The Monster Spotter's Guide.  As in the opening quote, are all of these things just semiotic phantoms of some sort, the modern equivalent of being spoken to by the Virgin Mary?  Or are some of them real, things that fall squarely into the Shakespearian "more things on Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy" category?

Personally, I stand my ground as per previous comments:  show me one.  There has to be some reason that all the entries in The Monster Spotter's Guide to North America are illustrated with line drawings instead of photographs.

 - Sid

* Sorry again, Laurie, still not Nazi frog men, these are the anuran variety.