Review: Mysterious Creatures

Mysterious Creatures by Time-Life Books
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Mysterious Creaturs is a volume of the Mysteries of the Unknown series focusing on cryptozoology.

As I've said before, I was huge into cryptids as a kid, back when the world was a bigger place with plenty of room for unknown hominids and relict dinosaur populations. While we were visiting in California, I noticed my brother-in-law had a complete set of Mysteries of the Unknown, plus a six or seven doubles he wanted to give away. Since he wouldn't take no for an answer, I took this one with me, reasoning that I could use it to protect my wife's photo of us with Brent Spiner on the flight home and I could always stash it on a shelf in the basement and forget about it. I made the mistake of paging through it, seeing familiar (and sketchy) photos of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster and I was powerless to resist its pull.

As the title indicates, Mysterious Creatures is about mysterious creatures, creatures that people have seen (or think they've seen) that may or may not actually exist. While I greatly enjoyed my trip to the Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine, and the fiction of Hunter Shea, I'm very much a cynical, skeptical adult. This book may not have changed my mind on most of the creatures within but the tentacles of nostalgia had me snared.

For a book about cryptids, this is a slick, nice-looking books. The photos and illustrations are high quality. It was published in 1988 so there are some things that have since been debunked. However, there's still a lot of good content, including the photos that are in every other cryptozoology book like the Surgeon's photo of the Loch Ness Monster and still shots from the infamous Bigfoot film and centuries-old woodcuts of the Kraken.

For the most part, it's the big name monsters like the Loch Ness Monster, sea serpents, Bigfoot, and his cousins from all over the world that get most of the attention. Fortunately, Mokele Mbembe, the dinosaur of the Congo, gets a few pages. One of the lesser known cryptids, the Almas of Mongolia, gets a few as well at the end of the hominid chapter. For some reason, the Almas are the cryptids that I like the most as an adult. A relict Neanderthal population in a remote part of Mongolia sounds a lot less far-fetched than surviving dinosaurs to me.

For a cryptid fan, this book is a cool overview. However, the lesser known monsters don't get much play. There's no goatman, no mothman, no Mongolian Death Worm, etc. Three out of five stars, although your mileage may vary depending on how into cryptozoology you are and how much you've already read.

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