A Natural History of the Unnatural World
"The Cryptozoological Society of London"
St. Martin's Press
Fiction, YA Fantasy/Bestiary
**+
DESCRIPTION: For over a century, the prestigious Cryptozoological Society of London has been recognized as a world leader in the field of cryptozoology, the study of unknown animals. From their many files and correspondences, the society has published a compendium of encounters with and reports of beings the rest of the world considers fantastic.
REVIEW: I honestly couldn't tell if this book was using the "field reports" simply as a gimmick, or if it was deliberately insulting true cryptozoologists. The writers lumped creatures such as winged horses (for which there is no evidence, even anecdotal encounters) in with sasquatches and lake monsters (for which there are plenty of eyewitness accounts and other evidence.) This book made it seem as if real cryptozoologists are as concerned with hunting down giants and dragons as they are with proving the existence of unknown animals. Chapter-starting sections that initially seemed like discussions of real topics become increasingly mixed with pseudoscientific attempts to justify fantastic creatures in real-life terms. They should've made the distinction a bit more clear when they left off cryptozoology and entered imaginary speculation. I like the range of creatures they covered here. This is the first place I've seen a few of them mentioned, and some of their illustrations are interesting. However, it fell apart with the too-clever text and uninteresting "personal encounters." There is an almost desperate feel about the overly-punnish subtitles in most sections, as if they thought young adult readers might have an attention span of less than a paragraph and wanted to be sure they kept reading. Some of the "articles" are presented in eye-straining formats, such as photographs of hand-written letters on brown paper; I could not then and still cannot read most of their Vampire entry because of this problem. Such items could have augmented other, more legible entries, but more than one creature is described entirely in impossible-to-read formats. I think they were trying to be too clever for their own good when they put this book together. It's a nice idea, but the execution is weak.
You might also enjoy:
The Book of Imaginary Beings (Jorge Luis Borges, Fiction - Bestiary of imaginary creatures from many sources)
The Encyclopedia of Monsters (Daniel Cohen, Nonfiction - Cryptids, fabulous beasts, alien encounters, and more oddities)
Cryptozoology A - Z (Loren Coleman & Jerome Clarke, Nonfiction - A listing of cryptids past and present)
Monsters: An Investigator's Guide to Magical Beings (John Michael Greer, Nonfiction - A book on paranormal encounters and how to deal with them)
The Book of Fabulous Beasts (Joseph Nigg, Nonfiction - Classical origins of many fabulous beasts)
Fablehaven (Brandon Mull, YA Fiction - Children discover a sanctuary for magical beings and beasts on their grandparents' farm)
Avalon 1: Circles in the Stream(Shelly Roberts, YA Fiction - Three girls find magical animals on an old nature preserve)
Dr. Ernest Drake's Monsterology (Dugald A. Steer, editor, YA Fiction - A "monsterologist" discusses the world's hidden and magical beasts)
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