In The Book Of The Damned, Fort wrote about “giants that will walk by… and the bizarre and the grotesque.” Coghlan has marshalled his own procession of almost 1,000 damned creatures, ranging from the six-inch long Two Tentacled Creature to the 200-ft long Richibacto sea serpent of 1895. Between these extremes lie huge blobs, carnivorous plants, sea serpents, gargoyles, giant birds, living dinosaurs and enough tentacled beasts to fill an HP Lovecraft novel. Their very names conjure up bizarre images: the Hog Killing Varmint, the Double-Nosed Andean Tiger Hound, the Ninki-Nanka, the Sqrat (a rat/squirrel hybrid) and El Pestizo, to mention a mere clawful.

Further Cryptozoology contains 50 updated and 900 entirely new entries to add to those in Coghlan’s A Dictionary Of Cryptozoology (2004) and Cryptosup (2005), but its referencing is odd and inconsistent.

There are only three magazine sources (reference #1 for Animals and Men, #7 for Fate, and #9 for Fortean Times). Thus, if a reference is given as #9 it only tells the reader it was an issue of FT between 2004 and 2006. I trust you see the problem, dear reader.

The book sources are more straightforward e.g. reference A7 is for Chad Arment’s Historical Bigfoot and G12 for Linda Godfrey’s Hunting The American Werewolf. These titles have now been added to my wish list at Amazon.

But to find out more about the Malibu Beach Humanoid that grabbed the actress Shelley Winters during WWII, I am stuck. The reference is S11, so the book author’s last name starts with S, but the source list jumps from R9 to S20. This is especially puzzling, as the entry is a new, not an updated one, so presumably the full title is not in Coghlan’s earlier books either!

The last source section consists of websites. Once again, the source list skips over many referenced numbers e.g. the fascinating sounding Singapore Creature (something like a walking beach ball) is reference 230. All the reader can deduce is that it is a website somewhere! It would have taken only a few more pages to list all sources for the references in this book. If necessary, space could have been gained by chopping a couple of the more whimsical entries.

An enormous amount of effort has clearly gone into compiling the entries for Further Cryptozoology. It is unfortunate that Coghlan has not made it easy for the reader to find out further information or to check the original sources.

Coghlan must be given credit for pushing the boundaries of accepted cryptozoology to include all manner of odd humanoids beyond the normally included hairy hominids and lizardmen types. This is sure to be controversial in crypto circles.