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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
On the track of unknown animals... with a six pack., 9 Aug 2004
An enjoyable romp through a catalogue of British Monsters. The inclusion of an index and footnotes makes this a useful tome for research, but I am left wondering how much of this road trip is embellishment. Certainly the references for the stories gleaned from the newspapers check out (or at least the ones that I've looked into do), but there are a lot of 'anonymous' witnesses and some of them seem too good to be true. Of course this doesn't preclude their stories from being 'true', it's just that they seem quite archetypal. The witch, the chap in the old dark mansion, the ageing hippy researching King Arthur, it's just a bit... clean, I don't know, maybe it really did happen as Redfern says it did. Having said that, this really is a fantastic read, very informative and extremely funny in places, particularly the sequence in the witch's cottage (the humour is often at the expense of poor Jon Downes of the Centre for Fortean Zoology, although Redfern is always affectionate about the excellent Mr. Downes). At the end it all gets very serious and Redfern proposes a theory to explain the monsters that is more frightening than a prospective encounter with a physical creature. I won't ruin the end for you, because I really recommend you read this book. Funnier than Andrew Collins' questing books, laced throughout with punk references, boozing, midnight scrabbles through woodland, ill advised summoning rituals, with the occasional genuinely unsettling moment. Redfern is a down to earth author with no pretension to 'spiritual truth'. Read it, you will be entertained and next time you find yourself on your own in some out of the way piece of woodland, or driving along a moonlit country lane, you might think back to this book and feel not just a little afraid.I would have liked to give this five stars, but there were a couple of points that let the book down slightly, for me anyway. Firstly I wanted more information about the encounters, but this was probably beyond the scope of the book and secondly I could have really done with some visuals, if only of the protagonists and their 'mystery machine', but a few maps and location photos would not have gone amiss. I suspect that publisher's constraints are more to blame than the author's intentions. *Note to the publishers, next time give Nick some space for some pictures*. I look forward to Redfern's next book, in the meantime I'm off to join the CFZ.
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by Nick Redfern
by Nick Redfern
by Jonathan Downes
by Fortean Times Magazine
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