The United States of Cryptids: A Tour of America's Myths and Monsters
J. W. Ocker
Quirk Books
Nonfiction, Cryptozoology/Travel
Themes: Aliens, Country Tales, Cross-Genre, Cryptids and Unknown Beasts, Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Animals, Encyclopedias, Folklore, Water Monsters
***+
Description
Chupacabras, the Jersey Devil, Mothman... America is riddled with famous cryptids. There's at least one local "Bigfoot" in nearly every state. But for every Champy, there are dozens of less well-known water monsters. For every Area 51 and little grey men, there are numerous otherworldly and impossible encounters remembered only by the small towns where they purported to happen. On a coast-to-coast tour, the author touches on numerous cryptids, famous and obscure, terrifying to cutesy, mysterious to admitted hoaxes - and proudly celebrated to nearly forgotten.
Review
If you're looking for in-depth explorations of cryptozoology or the folklore of monster stories, this is not the book for
you. If, on the other hand, you're looking for a lightweight, humorous romp through the weird and wondrous map of America's
strange beasts and small-town tourist attractions, The United States of Cryptids is right up your alley, or rather
right up your out-of-the-way stretch of country road where locals keep glimpsing something strange.
Ocker starts out on his journey with a love of the strange, sometimes goofy and sometimes creepy critters that have leapt,
flown, crawled, swum, or slithered from local folklore. His premise, like that of many cryptid aficionados, is that the
story is always real, whether or not the monster exists. It's the story that draws people in, that's shared in local bars or
hair salons, that brings a burst of media attention in a flurry of real or spurious sightings or investigations, and that
sometimes eventually gets embraced by towns looking to boost their economy with festivals or tourist traps. Indeed, more
than one entry here is the result of a town, or even just one individual, deciding to create a tourist draw. Ocker breezes
- almost literally - through a number of these stories, making up for in range of entries what is lost on any semblance of
depth (or pictures, or even maps). Granted, some of these are just too minor to have much more to say about them than "a
few people saw what may have been a monster here umpteen years ago", without even a rough description, but I still sometimes
hoped for a little more to sink my imagination's teeth into. Sometimes the humor feels a bit flippant/irritating, too. And
I'm not quite sure that the admitted tricks or products of local chambers of commerce should've been in the same category as
the cryptids/attractions that grew out of local strange happenings or legends; there's a different feel to the town that
decided to make mermaid statues or put gnome figurines around for no reason other than to drum up business, compared to the
one where people claim to have glimpsed "something" and it was later embellished and embraced with murals and a festival.
But Ocker gets marks for the sheer variety of entries, many of which are so obscure I've never seen them listed elsewhere
(the ones too bizarre and thinly documented for even the cryptozoology community to bother investigating).