Nick Redfern
(2020, Visible Ink, 366 pp.)
(NOTE: the blog program changed its interface and I'm having a little trouble getting the colors to come up right, so please forgive the odd appearance of this post!)
Nick is an indefatigable seeker of oddities natural and supernatural, and his many interests leave the title topic a bit obscured. As he knows, I'm an aficionado of strictly physical cryptozoology. If I have an official quote on the topic, it's "If it’s not zoology, it’s not cryptozoology.” Nick's approach is that, although “high strangeness” reports don’t concern physical cryptozoology, there are such reports about famous cryptids like Bigfoot, and that to him is worth investigating. I don’t dismiss parapsychology out of hand, but don't expect a comprehensive book on sea serpents and their ilk.
The book does collect interesting reports on lake and sea monsters, some new to me. It ranges much farther afield, though, all the way to man-eating trees, a giant snake killed in Bolivia by the CIA (actually, this one is really interesting), and so on. But scientific credibility on zoology per se is left behind at hte first mention of reptilian shape-shifters. Creature reports from Loch Ness are interesting, but pages devoted to Alastair Crowley (while a fascinating story of human weirdness) seemingly have no bearing on whether there are plesiosaurs in a Scottish lake.
Many pages of
this book are taken up by multi-paragraph quotes from old books and recent
websites. That’s not always a bad thing:
most notably, Redfern shows how fundamental the work of Henry Lee (Sea
Monsters Unmasked, 1883) is to the still-quoted body of “sea serpent”
evidence. The most interesting original investigation is Nick’s accounts of modern reports of creatures in small bodies of water in
England and speculate what could be there and why it was only recently noticed
(he fingers a small released crocodilian, no doubt dead by now, as one culprit).
Redfern brings
this to a close with a quick review of the classification schemes proposed for
sea monsters, although I wished he’d diagrammed them for comparison. He makes the valid point, though, that these are ventures aren't very useful without more evidence. He goes on to his own thoughts about cryptids. He and cryptozoologist Richard Freeman suggest some are material animals and some emerge from a deep memory of
ancient-predator archetypes that come up when the brain is disturbed (should Carl
Jung get partial credit here?). The book ends with a bit about how pollutants are producing mutant animals and
might have a role in some oversize or odd-looking creatures reported as
“monsters.” A recent example given here concerns deformed frogs in the U.S. The 1.3-meter frog reported here is a bit harder to fit to this paradigm.
There are no chapter notes or endnotes, so it’s up to the reader to figure which account might be tied to which source in the 10-page bibliography. There are also some editing mistakes: an account by a Loch Ness researcher is repeated verbatim in two chapters. That and the long quotes give the book a disjointed feel. I'm not sure whether the publication was rushed or just that Nick is such a prolific writer that wanting to share his latest thoughts occasionally trips him up.
As someone who thinks of cryptozoology as strictly a wants-to-be hard science devoted to finding real animals, the book wasn't what I'd hoped for: the side trips sap the impact of the zoology. Nick is the author and he of course writes what interests him, just as we all do, and he can write clearly and well. If your interests match his, there’s a lot here to keep you turning the pages.
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