A Guide To Sky Monsters

Thunderbirds, The Jersey Devil, Mothman and Other Flying Cryptids

TS Mart and Mel Cabre Red Lightning Books 2021 Hb, 200pp, £21.99, ISBN 9781684351244

After surveying the world of hairy humanoids in their debut book, The Legend of Bigfoot, the motherdaughter team of TS Mart and Mel Cabre next turn their attention skyward for a similar survey of winged things in their A Guide

To Sky Monsters.

And what is a sky monster? Their definition is quite broad, basically amounting to any cryptid that flies, although the most attention is reserved for the three creatures name-checked in the sub-title: Thunderbirds, the Jersey Devil and the Mothman. Beyond reviewing these American monsters’ familiar origins and their body of lore, the authors dig a good bit deeper to provide cultural context, helping to explain the significance of, say, birds of prodigious size in Native American spiritual beliefs, while quite carefully equivocating on whether real animals gave rise to those beliefs, or if those beliefs primed people to see the animals (or believe they saw them, as the case may be).

Though not always the sexiest parts of the book, it is this context – like the colonial era warfare and Cold War anxiety of the Ohio River valley giving rise to Mothman, for example – that makes the stories of these most famous monsters fascinating, and it is what separates this guide from so many similar books on the subject.

And then there’s artist Cabre’s quite masterful illustrations. These combine details from sighting reports and folklore with a keen understanding of how real animals are put together and how their bodies work, so that Cabre acts akin to a police sketch artist, coming up with a particular design for a particular cryptid that looks like it’s able to account for the extant record and maybe even exist in the real world, however unlikely it is that many of these monsters might actually exist.

Cabre’s remarkable illustrations really come to the fore in two chapters, “Who’s Who in the American Sky” and “Who’s Who in the Sky Around the World”. Each is devoted to brief, encyclopædialike profiles of monsters. As in The Legend of Bigfoot, in which Cabre managed to make a score or so of similar creatures look like completely different species, there’s an admirable variety in this menagerie, with no two monsters mistakable for one another.

If there’s another Mart and Cabre book of monsters on the shelf soon, I’d welcome it.

★★★★