Review of Of Books and Beasts: A Cryptozoologist’s Library

By Matt Bille

The subject of cryptozoology, like many Fortean fields, is plagued by poor scholarship. This is not a dig at the topic, but merely an undeniable and unfortunate fact. Whether the subject is psychics, or ghosts, or anything else, there is no shortage of information on these topics, but what’s needed is not merely information but good, valid, well-researched information. There is a huge difference between some random blogger’s opinions of the existence of Bigfoot, and, for example, organized, published research by noted, credible researchers such as John Green, Jeff Meldrum, Karl Shuker, or Daniel Perez. Cryptozoology is a big tent, and for any given cryptid there will be a variety of sources and researchers; for lake monsters, for example, one might look for noted researchers such as John Kirk, Roy Mackal, Loren Coleman, Michel Meurger, or Peter Costello (or even, I might modestly add, Joe Nickell and myself).

Of course for every one of these people there are dozens or hundreds of others who have also written on the same topic. The point is not to create or enforce some arbitrary cutoff for who is or is not a good scholar or careful researcher—though hopefully that would become apparent in the process—but instead to give the casual reader some guide to it all.

In many cases it’s simply plagiarized, cut-and-pasted material from elsewhere. About ten years ago while reviewing a cryptozoological topic I stumbled across huge swaths of a popular book that had simply been lifted from internet sources: The Element Encyclopedia of Vampires: An A – Z of the Undead, by Theresa Cheung and published by an otherwise reputable house, HarperCollins. It became clear that Cheung “wrote” many entries her book by merely typing a subject name into Google and then cutting and pasting paragraphs from the top three or four hits, changing a few words, and then submitting it as her own work. (For more on my investigation see my article “Investigating Plagiarism in New Age Books” in the July/August 2013 issue of Skeptical Inquirer magazine). My colleague Kenny Biddle exposed similar plagiarism issue with the Zak Bagans book—or, rather, the book attributed to Bagans—Ghost-Hunting For Dummies.

I mention this because just as one of the chief challenges for cryptozoologists is trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, the hoaxes from the good evidence, the same challenge applies to scholarly researchers. There’s no central authority making any attempt to hold evidence to any scientific evidential standard. In scientific research, there is some semblance of gatekeeping (imperfect as it is), partly because researchers are held professionally accountable for mistakes. For example, if the editor of a top medical journal publishes highly dubious (or even outright hoaxed) research, he or she can expect significant opprobrium, including calls to resign. There is no analogous position in Bigfoot research; a handful of journals have attempted to impose some scholarly standards on the research, including Cryptozoology: Interdisciplinary Journal of the International Society of Cryptozoology (1982–1996). But most of what passes for cryptozoological research appears in blogs, New Age books, and social media posts with little or no quality control or outside input (much less skeptical commentary).

This is one reason why Matt Bille’s book Of Books and Beasts is useful, providing some token effort at quality control and a sense of what’s useful. As the back cover notes, “Science writer and cryptozoology researcher Matt Bille offers 400 reviews of significant books in cryptozoology, supporting sciences like biology, and cryptozoological fiction. Matt’s selections, based on 45 years of reading and writing on zoology and cryptozoology, favor reliable science and history, providing an essential foundation for enthusiasts and skeptics alike. The search for unknown animals starts here.” I have several of his cryptozoology-related books, my favorite of which is Shadows of Existence: Discoveries and Speculations in Zoology.

The book is a delight to peruse, and offers excellent capsule descriptions on hundreds of books and sources that had flown under my—and surely most people’s—radar. It is sprinkled with quotes and occasionally whimsical “Matt’s Musings,” brief commentary set off in italics. The book is culled primarily from book reviews written over the decades for the Exotic Zoology newsletter, his blog, and other sources. The entries, which range from a few sentences to a few pages, are engaging and concise, and occasionally point to updated or reissued volumes. The book is divided into four sections: Cryptozoology Books; Related Sciences; Crypto-Fiction; and A Marvelous Miscellany.

My main reservation about Of Books and Beasts is not Bille’s writing style nor expertise but instead the book’s purpose and scope. When eager authors ask me for book writing advice I first ask them to identify their audience and tell me how the book will serve that audience. What will they get from it? How will it help them? Why should they pick up that book instead of another, similar title by a different author? What, specifically, are they bringing to the project that makes it worth their (often considerable) time to write, and more importantly their readers’ time to read?

This reader’s perspective was an issue I repeatedly returned to reading Of Books and Beasts. Bille is candid about the scope of the material in the book, offering many broad caveats about why books were left out. Some are fairly understandable and straightforward, such as including only books in English, original editions, and under a century old. He reviews only books he’s personally read; omitted most (but not all) of the state-specific titles (e.g., Monsters of Missouri); and skipped over annuals published by periodicals. But he also “passed over or culled many of the Sasquatch and Loch Ness books because they’d overwhelm this entire book,” with no indication given about which books are omitted, or why (other than that the sheer quantity of them, regardless of their quality, would render them unmanageable). If Bille was not interested in (or didn’t read about) a particular cryptid, no matter how popular—say, Mothman, thunderbirds, or the chupacabra—then they may merit only a passing mention, if they appear at all.

I understand that the book is not meant to be, and cannot be, definitive or exhaustive, and I’m sympathetic to his plea of “too many books” (p. x) but this speaks to a basic problem in the scope of the book. You can’t write a dictionary and arbitrarily omit some words merely because including them would be too cumbersome, in the same way that you can’t offer a book on the fifty states and leave out a few because the task became overwhelming. For the same reason you can’t offer a seemingly authoritative book on the cryptozoological literature and leave out swaths of material. I suspect that George Eberhart and Michael Newton, authors of the two main cryptozoology encyclopedias, encountered the same issue. It’s a monumental task, if done correctly, to write informative entries, along with references, for hundreds of reputed cryptids.

For a book whose subtitle promises cryptozoology, surprisingly little of the book is dedicated to cryptozoology per se; only the first section (about 125 pages) deals with, in order: A Basic Library of Cryptozoology, Primates, Land Animals, Lake and Sea Creatures, and Others. This raises the venerable questions of demarcation in cryptozoology, which can profitably be approached from many different angles including eyewitness accounts, folklore, and so on. The second half of the book covers a much broader scope, from evolution to paleontology to fiction involving cryptids and monsters. These are all arguably within the purview—but again so are folklore, eyewitness testimony, forensics, and so on, all of which are absent here. This is not Bille’s fault, of course, and there’s no particular reason he would have reviewed books on those topics. But it does limit the book’s utility for its intended audience, who likely would have preferred a broader selection of core cryptozoology books. The review copy I was provided had nearly thirty pages of unnumbered indices—containing only lists of authors but no corresponding page numbers—which made it very difficult to use as a reference, though I was told that later editions would have a numbered index.

The book is best understood and appreciated as a well-read cryptozoology researcher’s interesting (albeit idiosyncratic and limited) thoughts and reviews of books he’s read on the topic of cryptozoology. The book walks a fine—and occasionally crossed—line between straight book review and commentary about the topics under review; despite Bille’s note in the afterword that “I’ve avoided offering my opinions in the various cryptids as much as I can,” his opinion on many come though clearly. This is not a criticism, and in fact if anything I would have welcomed a section at the end of each chapter (instead of at the end of each review, which would quickly become repetitive) on his learned take on the topics. After all, he has read more cryptozoology books than most of us (even in the field) ever will, so he’s in a great position to do so. Nevertheless, that material can be found in his other books, including Shadows of Existence, as noted above. For what it is, overall Of Books and Beasts is an informative and entertaining collection of one noted cryptozoologist’s book reviews.