“You wish to find what is true, and I’m afraid you’re going to find damned little; I want what is false, and I’ve found plenty.”
–The Fifth Head of Cerberus
Among SF and fantasy fans, there are few who have not heard of the Loch Ness Monster. Most of these have also heard of sea serpents, although this reviewer has met few who believe them to be real. While this review is not about the “reality” of Nessie or other monsters, it does concern a topic of interest, which we’ve visited before: the role of real and imagined apex predators in real and imagined worlds.[1] What are sea serpents, their lake-kin included? What do they do? And what stories can we tell about them?
British writer F. W. Holiday, author of books about dragons and goblins, turns his attention to Nessie in The Great Orm of Loch Ness. This volume, published in 1968, surveys the available anecdotes and blurry photos.[2] His baffling conclusion is that the “fish without fin” is a Tully monster[3], a tiny creature from the Pennsylvanian. Of course, first of all, the Tully monster was only a few inches long, and second of all, it’s been extinct for three hundred million years. Nevertheless, GMs and writers will find much inspiration in the tales of various creatures which flop and crawl around the loch in this book. An entire story could be made of the attempts to find, kill, or save some such monster.
In the Wake of the Sea Serpents is a much more exhaustive, and exhausting, book. Written by founding cryptozoologist Bernard Heuvelmans, also an author of books on the Kraken and on surviving Neanderthals, it surveys literally all accounts of sea serpents and other monstrosities from early times until the post-WWII era (1969) when the book was published. The reader must wade (if you will) through a number of nearly-identical accounts of strange encounters, but some may skip to the end, which has a detailed account of several types of purported sea monsters, and would be most useful for tale-tellers and GMs.
What can we salvage from the wrecks of cryptozoology? Well, the general theme of these reviews is the same: the fantastic is constantly retreating from us. Where Heuvelmans could imagine krakens and serpents in the deep sea, we have the miserable news of declining fish stocks. But the worlds of our imagination, at least, are endless, and these books might help an avid world-maker. Recommended with reservations.
[1] Addressed here: https://cirsova.wordpress.com/2021/04/02/guest-post-gods-teeth-a-review-of-david-quammens-monster-of-god-by-j-comer/
[2] The most famous is discussed here. https://hoaxes.org/nessie.html
[3] Discussed here. https://www.livescience.com/54070-photos-tully-monster.html
Cirsova 