Early in Karl Shuker's cryptozoological career it may have seemed that he was doing little more than plough furrows already well enough tilled by the discipline's founding father, Bernard Heuvelmans. It's only comparatively recently that the sheer range of Shuker's interests and expertise have become apparent, and he has succeeded in placing himself apart from all the other monster-hunters and single-issue specialists who search for hidden animals.
Nowhere is his versatility better displayed than in this compilation of short articles, which discusses almost one hundred possible mystery animals without mentioning Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster once. Instead, Shuker concentrates rewardingly on the subject's marginalia, conjuring a dazzling array of maybe-animals that are almost always bizarre, and frequently zoologically impossible. From the water-rhinoceros of Lough Dubh to the vampire `death bird' of Ethiopia, and from the triple-headed river monsters of Bolivia to the white-furred elephantine sea serpent once washed ashore on the coast of South Africa, these are, for the most part, creatures that shouldn't exist - even though there's plenty of amusement value in supposing that they do.
The trouble with this otherwise entertaining volume is that Shuker fails, for the most part, to address the central problem of rationalising his own casebook. Many of the animals he describes are supposed to have been seen by only a handful of people, others by only a single witness. Yet the zoological implications of presuming that these are accurately described flesh-and-blood animals are so momentous that it's intensely frustrating to see the author skating over the problem of identity either without comment, or with the suggestion that a misperception of some ordinary animal is to blame.
This isn't really Shuker's fault - his original brief, after all, was to pen a series of short commentaries on cryptozoological themes for Fate, the veteran American weirdzine, none of which stretch to more than a few hundred words, and which have been compiled here by the magazine's publisher. So there's never any room to consider the finer points of the many mysteries on display, or their sociopsychological ramifications - much less to debate whether or not a straight cryptozoological interpretation of the witness descriptions is the correct one.
This isn't to say that Flying Toads is a bad book - it's packed with out-of-the-way information, and anyone interested in cryptozoology will learn something from it. It's just that the author has shown, in many of his other works, that he is aware that such questions need to be asked, and answered.
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