A Natural History of the Unnatural World
Joel Levy and the Cryptozoological Society of London
St. Martin's Press
Fiction, MG? Fantasy/Folklore
Themes: Bestiaries, Cryptids, Dragons, Faeries, Gryphons, Merfolk and Water Monsters, Unicorns, Werebeasts, Vampires
**+
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 anecdotal evidence.) This book made it seem as if real cryptozoologists are as concerned with tracking giants and dragons as they are with investigating 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. On the plus side (of which there were few enough), 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 readers 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 couldn't 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 may have been a nice idea, but the execution is weak.