MAPS OF THE UNKNOWN: Phases of the Wildman

After Nessie, now we're on the trail of Chinese Wildmen, ranging afar from Tibet to Hubei to Jiulong Mountain. From The Four Major Mysteries of Mainland China by Paul Dong.

Courtesy Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1984.

MAPS OF THE UNKNOWN: Loch Ness VI

Another reference map from Tim Dinsdale's Loch Ness Monster, 4th edition.

By now we've got quite a spread of Loch Ness maps, taken from fact and fiction:

Loch Ness Monster, by Tim Dinsdale

The Monsters of Loch Ness by Roy P. Mackal

The Story of the Loch Ness Monster by Tim Dinsdale

The Loch Ness Story by Nicholas Witchell

Monster by Jeffrey Konvitz

The Great Orm of Loch Ness by F.W. Holiday

The Loch Ness Mystery Solved by Ronald Binns

Creatures From the Inner Sphere by F.W. Holiday

Courtesy Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1982 (original pub. 1961).

ARCHIVAL UPDATES: UFO TREK

Warren Smith's UFO Trek is now available to read and download at archive dot org. The file contains the Sphere edition, the original Zebra Books artwork and Zebra's retitled reissue artwork as well.

Courtesy Sphere Books, 1977 (original pub. 1976).

THE NIGHT OF THE TOY DRAGONS by Barney Cohen

Albino mutant pygmy alligators! They're massing beneath NYC, their appetite rising to a fever pitch ... will we be prepared when they rise, and we face THE NIGHT OF THE TOY DRAGONS? And after slogging through Cohen's turgid technothriller drivel, will we care? Probably not!

Cohen's first victim is a sewer worker named Boggs, in a strange bit of synchronicity with David Hagberg's far superior Croc. Was there something in the water? The killer alligators act like cartoon piranhas, stripping bodies to the bone in minutes. At one point, they decapitate a police dog and somehow throw the head back at their human pursuers ... why? These cartoonish antics don't mesh with Cohen's wannabe verisimilitude of computer tooth analysis and bureaucratic infighting, and both aspects are crowded out by too much filler of midcentury character drama: home life, hookups, and the battle of the sexes. Cohen doesn't excel at any of these threads and the final effect is supreme dissatisfaction.

Eventually we get a final battle of flamethrowers vs alligators, but it's too little too late, and the story ends on a promise of more to come as the surviving characters gear up for yet another wave of invincible super-gators which simply elicits an eye roll. David Lippincott's comparable disaster dud Tremor Violet ended the same way, with more violence to come, but that was the one successful play in Lippincott's book. Here it's just another disappointment.

Author Cohen also wrote a couple science fiction thrillers, and ... a puff piece on Sting?

Pure terror ...

How doth the little crocodile improve his shining tail fail? Cohen's crocodilian cockup earns a 1/4 rating ... boo, hiss!

A Berkeley Medallion Book, 1977

ARCHIVAL UPDATES: STRANGE SECRETS OF THE LOCH NESS MONSTER

Warren Smith's Strange Secrets of the Loch Ness Monster is now available to read and download at archive dot org, including back page ads for his other Zebra specials.

Courtesy Zebra Books, 1976.