Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I want a sequel!, 13 Jan 2005
I passed this by in the book shop many times, but gave in and took it to Bali with me for holiday reading. I am so glad I did! I have been on similar 'quests' myself and this book acurately portrays how these quests manifest.
The subtle humour endears you to the three guys seeking monsters,and makes you wish you could have been there with them.
The conclusion Nick Redfern reaches is thought provoking and leaves you wondering 'what if'.
My only criticisim is that I wanted to know more about the particular cases, and specifically why the police turned up when they did at the mansion.
It is an episode of Scooby Do for the young at heart, but a good read all the same. I only wish I could have been their Daphne!
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5 of 6 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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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Well you've probably read the other reviews..., 24 Feb 2008
... Chances are that you've read the other reviews so I'm not going to rant on about literary structure and how unbelievable Redfern might or might not come across. Instead I'd rather just point out that, one: It's a book about three men in a camper-van, who all have experience in their fields of work and who, ultimately, are aiming to get utterly hammered in the process of having a good - if obscure - time; two: they have a good and fairly obscure time (and if it wasn't written like a bleeding novel then it would probably be a somewhat less fun and considerably more boring time for the reader...); and finally, three: it's a book about monsters! Since when does your average person take a book about monsters seriously? Mildly ficticious in places or not, it manages to be amusing, interesting, informative (well, sometimes, if you want to be harsh about it) and refreshing.
In fact, I recomend it (...shock, horror)! In fact, I recomend it highly, if you can take something lightheartedly and seriously at the same time and if you have an ounce of empathy for characters. And, in fact, if I hadn't been as concerned as I was about the other reviewers finding me and burning my house down or some-such just for doing so, I would have given it five bleeding stars. So there.
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