Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places by Colin Dickey – 3.25 stars
For a country with a comparatively short written history, the United States has a great many ghosts, and the most compelling of those have their stories rooted deep in the places from which they’ve sprung up.
This was a nice seasonal read which reminded me to look about me with a greater awareness of the many small histories that must cling to every bus station or convenience store I pass, even as they stick to all the places one would usually consider generally prone to haunting. I appreciated the history discussed, as well as insight into why some kinds of places are more often considered haunted than others.
However, I did wish that Dickey got more in-depth with the stories, or included more of the scraps of stories that he often references. Ghost stories are by their nature shadowy and ill-documented, so it would have interesting to see more of the versions that he’d collected, not just the places they inhabited.
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The United States of Cryptids by JW Ocker – 4 stars
When one thinks of cryptids in the United States, Bigfoot is what usually comes to mind – but each state claims more bizarre and mysterious inhabitants, and each one tells a story about its community, whether it believes in them or not.
I have never seen a cryptid. (The closest I’ve ever come was witnessing the furryback half of a strange creature producing crunching noises from the pantry one bleary night – closer inspection revealed that it was my beagle illicitly gorging himself on barbecue chips.) I’m not sure that I even believe in them. But they certainly make for entertaining stories, and it turns out there are more strange tales of various kinds of cryptids throughout the United States than I’d ever heard of.
In this book Ocker takes us across the country to explore the stories of dozens of cryptids, ranging from your classic lake monsters and various Bigfoots to bizarre one-offs like an enormous turtle and an extraterrestrial robot in a dress. He does not invite you to believe in it all – is in fact a skeptic himself – but instead discusses the circumstances of the place and people where the cryptid was seen, and how those stories are thought of in those places today.
I enjoyed the humorous tone and the creepy-cute illustrations scattered throughout, as well as the occasional asides about the world of cryptid hunters and cryptozoologists. I did wish some stories went into more depth though – with just a couple pages per cryptid, more well-documented stories ended up more truncated that I’d have liked.