Bigfoot to Mothman: A Global Encyclopedia of Legendary Beasts and Monsters is a new cryptozoological compendium, written by Carroll College assistant professor of anthrozoology, Margo DeMello. Encyclopedias are unlike other non-fiction books. You don’t consult one for its innovative new perspective on a familiar subject, or for an in-depth examination of a singular topic. The aim of an encyclopedia is to be a reliable first reference; a jumping off point for researchers. It should provide a concise overview of various topics and lists of sources for more extensive exploration. Above all, an encyclopedia should be comprehensive in scope — broad rather than deep.
If such expectations weren’t enough, there’s also the fact that the biggest challenge a book like Bigfoot to Mothman faces is that there are already several excellent cryptozoological encyclopedias on the market. These include George M. Eberhart’s exhaustive two-volume Mysterious Creatures: A Guide to Cryptozoology (CFZ Press, 2013) and Michael Newton’s equally comprehensive Encyclopedia of Cryptozoology: A Global Guide to Hidden Animals and Their Pursuers (McFarland, 2014). For those looking for something easier to fit in their backpack, there’s also Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark’s Cryptozoology A To Z (Simon & Schuster, 1999).
I own all those books, but as I learned last year when asked to research an obscure bayou beast called the Grunch, even a cryptozoological library as formidable as that can occasionally let you down. As a result, I’m always willing to add another volume to my collection. But how well does Bigfoot to Mothman stack up against its competition?
For starters, at only 320 pages, Bigfoot to Mothman doesn’t compare to either Eberhart’s 722-page or Newton’s 584-page backbreaking tomes. It’s far closer to Coleman and Clark’s 270-page Cryptozoology A To Z, while still being less comprehensive. That’s because Coleman and Clark, as well as Newton, not only covered cryptids, but also notable cryptozoologists, cryptozoological organizations, and incidents. In contrast, Bigfoot to Mothman, like Mysterious Creatures, only looks at the cryptids themselves, and a decidedly curated selection, as opposed to Eberhart’s all-encompassing overview.
Perhaps the oddest aspect of Bigfoot to Mothman is the way DeMello divides her subject matter in half. The first part is titled “Cryptids,” and contains 53 entries, while the second is dedicated to “Extinct, Invented, or Mythical Creatures Similar to Cryptids,” and contains another 41 entries. Nowhere in the book is there an explanation as to why this division was made, or how DeMello determined which monsters belonged in which category.
Why is Mokèlé-mbèmbé a “Cryptid,” but the Emela-ntouka is a “Creature Similar to [a] Cryptid”? Both are allegedly extant dinosaurs reported to inhabit Africa, with exactly the same amount of respective non-existent evidence. Why categorize the Algonquin supernatural entity popularly known as the Wendigo as a “Cryptid,” but not the equally supernatural Tanzanian Popobawa? Why is Mothman a “Cryptid,” but the Flatwoods Monster isn’t? The list goes on.
As if this arbitrary cleaving wasn’t puzzling enough, Bigfoot to Mothman also contains a number of odd errors, suggesting that DeMello’s own research into the subject may have been somewhat cursory. In a few cases, it appears she’s not even consulted the sources she cites, such as the entry for the “Beast of Gévaudan,” where, despite crediting Jay M. Smith’s excellent 2011 historical study, she still repeats the claim that the Beast was killed by a silver bullet, which Smith takes pains to debunk. The entry on the “Grootslang” contains a bogus African myth about the monster being half-elephant half-snake, despite none of the primary sources listed saying anything about this.
In other instances, Bigfoot to Mothman looks to have included a particular cryptid as a means of introducing a concept rather than discussing that specific creature. The entry for the “Akkorokamui,” a giant octopus from Japan, takes up more space providing an overview of the topic of yokai – there are several yokai featured throughout this book – than it does describing this particular cryptid cephalopod, about which you can find better information in the shorter entry from Richard Freeman’s The Great Yokai Encyclopedia (CFZ Press, 2010).
Bigfoot to Mothman is also prone to tangents. The entry on the Vietnamese “Batatut,” more commonly known as the Ngu’ò’i Rù’ng to cryptozoologists, dovetails into the totally unrelated, completely unsourced, and decidedly spurious narrative of a sea-monster torpedoed by the German U-boat U28 in 1915. In a similar vein, the entry on “Bigfoot” spends several paragraphs describing what an “urban legend” is, a subject that would have made more sense for the book’s introduction.
That introduction is only 12-pages long, and it mostly consists of DeMello explaining how she hopes to move the subject of cryptozoology beyond the narrow paradigm of whether such creatures exist or not, and instead situate them “within their respective cultural, historical, and social contexts.” That’s an admirable goal, but aside from frequently ending entries with a reference to an obscure song about the cryptid in question, Bigfoot to Mothman does little to culturally contextualize the monsters it covers.
This handful of issues is admittedly based on a partial overview – 98 entries is a lot to assess – but feels representative of the book as a whole. About the only thing Bigfoot to Mothman really has to recommend it over its esteemed competition is its 15-page bibliography, which, by the simple virtue of being more recent, includes a number of sources on cryptozoology that didn’t exist a decade ago when Eberhart and Newton’s respective encyclopedias were last issued.
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