So this is twenty short stories about "fearsome critters" or cryptozoology of North America. Most of them come from old lumberjack oral traditions, and they are all whacky tall-tales to explain why so-and-so disappeared in the woods. I love lumberjack folklore, and this had the appropriate level of whackiness that captures the spirit of the tales told aloud. A lot of the sources I've been through lately are...dry. The animals are presented as they would in a beastiary, with basics about where they can be found and what they look like and what they do. If the author was talking about an elephant, I'd call it factual, but when they're talking about a squonk...I don't know. This was not like that, and it was a pleasant experience.
What this is is a set of short stories, each about a different absurd animal. They are very short--maybe eight pages at most with big type and illustrations that glow in the dark. Yeah. It's that kind of book. While the narrator is attempting to tell you about the animal in question, he usually does it by detailing an incident, and that incident was where there was a narrative aspect missing in a lot of written accounts of these animals. The narrator also inserts himself into the stories more often than not, either as a main character or as someone whose opinion nobody bothered to ask or to compare someone in the story to his arch-nemesis. He's the same narrator in each other the stories, so we learn more and more about him as we work through the book. Not enough to piece together some sort of larger narrative, but enough to get to know him.
On an incident where a boyscout troop was eaten: "Five of these scouts were tenderfoots, and hardly missed, but the sixth, Beauregard Shugtemple, had earned the coveted merit badge in phrenology, and so search parties combed the area for weeks to no avail. Beauregard Shagtemple was my nephew, and the young scamp had hidden the keys to my strongbox a week before disappearing, so it was particularly important to me that he be found..."
The thing I liked most about this was how it played with time and expectations. Most of these stories come from logging days, where the world was much less connected and they didn't have the technology we have today. So in a lot of writing about cryptozoology, the narrator is set in that time and is a kind of pseudo-scientist who didn't know any better. Here, the narrator has all of those trappings, and he's often telling stories set back in the day, but then he'll throw in something modern, and the juxtaposition will be funny.
For a beast in California: "We hired several native guides, mostly surfers and out-of-work actors..."
After a while his whole existence itself becomes strange. He's a kooky anachronism, who studies animals that don't exist, except they...do? And the Smithsonian recognizes them. But still call the study of these animals cryptozoology. This is not a nitpicky complaint or me pointing at continuity errors, but it's purposefully silly.
The whole thing is pretty silly. At one point they're being chased by a monster, who can't penetrate a shield they've finagled, so the monster turns around, shoots in the opposite direction, and the projectile goes all the way around the Earth and kills the guy our narrator is with. At one point, he's describing an encounter with an animal that's half bear, half deer and confuses people into thinking that it's one or the other so they're not prepared to face both. In response to being cornered by this beast, "But it could not have foreseen that I was not just a hunter but also a fly fisherman." And thus he escapes. It's this level of absurdity that's present in the oral tall-tales that I've been missing in my other research.
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Next week, Brooding YA Hero: Becoming a Main Character (Almost) as Awesome as Me, a satirical look at YA heroes, by Carrie Ann DiRisio.
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