Before we start . . . A little admission. This book is not really about monsters at all. Don’t get me wrong – I did set off on various adventures around the world to places where ‘monsters’ were reputed to roam, in the vain hope that I might bump into one. It’s just that both you and I know that this was very unlikely to happen – and, even if it did, I was probably the worst person in the world for it to happen to.
In the UK I’m famous for being a practical joker and an accomplished liar. In my first show, Trigger Happy TV, I used loads of furry costumes – including a Yeti outfit, in which I scared skiers on a Swiss ski-slope. So if I suddenly announced, in a much-hyped press conference broadcast live around the world, that I had found a ‘monster’, and then showed footage of said encounter, I might face some incredulity.
Done right I could probably still get away with it, though. Experience has shown that there is little our rapacious news outlets like more than a ‘monster’ story. Such scoops give them the excuse to endlessly replay blurry, shaky footage (does nobody own a tripod?) and get weird hairy men into the studio to talk about new discoveries of wild weird hairy men.
The former kind of hairy men often profess to be cryptozoologists. This is a posh scientific name for people who are interested in ‘monsters’. A lot of cryptozoologists decide to write books on the subject. Most of these books are incredibly dull. This is because these guys are writing about something that serious scientists don’t really take very seriously. So, to show how serious they are, cryptozoologists tend to write long, boring, pseudoscientific books in which they try desperately to prove to a disbelieving world that they are not nutters but actually distinguished men of science.
This is not a book like that. This is a book documenting my year spent travelling the world looking for ‘monsters’ and getting into all sorts of trouble with the ‘super creeps’.
Why do you keep putting the word ‘monsters’ in quotation marks?
Thank you for asking. It’s because I think it would be unfair to describe the creatures I’ve been after as ‘monsters’. The dictionary definition of the word is: ‘An imaginary creature that is typically large, ugly and frightening.’
This sounds more like some of my least-favourite British towns than it does anything I was going in search of.
Before I set off on my adventures I wasn’t convinced that they were all imaginary. Most were definitely supposed to be quite large. ‘Ugly’ is a subjective term anyway and certainly not one I’m prepared to throw at an eight-foot missing link. And these creatures are frightening only because we don’t know anything about them.
So far they have defeated science and managed to keep hidden(ish) from our modern world. Besides one kind of Yeti none of them are supposed to attack humans. As I set out, it seemed to me that they just want to be left alone to do whatever it is they like to do . . . If they exist at all. Confused? Welcome to my world.
Well, we didn’t start this – you called the book Scary Monsters and Super Creeps!
Yes . . . I know. I couldn’t resist. I’m a huge David Bowie fan and it was just perfect for the title. It sounded cool and I went with it – sorry. But from now on I won’t put the word ‘monsters’ in quotation marks. It would start getting really annoying, wouldn’t it?
Why monsters?
I love to travel – it’s my obsession – but I always need a purpose. For my last book, The Dark Tourist, I went on holiday to the sort of places that most people wouldn’t: Chernobyl, North Korea, ski slopes in Iran, etc. For this book I needed something new.
Some people travel the world birdwatching. (Costa Rica, for example, is a place where such nerds go to holiday – it’s full of twitcher couples all off to find some specific bird.) Big-game fishermen sail the Seven Seas trying to catch some special fish. I just decided to do the same: to try to find out as much as I could about the Big Six monsters of cryptozoology.
The ‘Big Six’?
OK – I don’t know why it had to be six. I guess that I was just thinking along the lines of the Big Six when you go on safari.
Some were obvious: Bigfoot and the Yeti were a given; the Loch Ness Monster was another obvious contender, though I was initially loath to choose it as this would hardly be the most exciting of foreign trips.
This left me with three others. I found some stuff about the Mokèlé-mbèmbé in the Congo. This sounded like a proper adventure and, since the big lure of my Yeti-expedition research was reading Tintin in Tibet, I thought that the theme could be continued with a Tintin in the Congo-type adventure (minus the hideous racism and the murdering of hundreds of animals).
Further googling – sorry, research – revealed a story about a monster that lives in the hills around Hiroshima. It’s called the Hibagon and one theory is that it’s a man who was irradiated in the Hiroshima explosion. This at first seemed the most tenuous of stories but I’ve always wanted to visit Japan and it’s a country with an enormous monster culture – after all, it’s the home of Godzilla.
This left me with a spare. I’m married to a Canadian, love Canada and have always wanted to write something about my semi-adopted country, so I chucked Ogopogo into the mix. Thus are adventures decided.
I think my initial interest in monsters came from a book I was given for my birthday as a kid. It was called Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World and was a companion piece to the 1980 series on UK telly. I loved this book. I read it from cover to cover, over and over again, and longed to go and find out more about the weird Yeti footprints found in the Himalayas and to find the spot where the infamous Super 8 footage of Bigfoot was filmed.
At about the same time a man came to my prep school and gave us a lecture about the Loch Ness Monster. I was transfixed. He showed us footage and photographs of ‘Nessie’. Once day, I vowed, I’d go and look for her.
So that’s how this book got going. I set off on all my trips with an open mind. I’d really love to think that there was a Bigfoot or a Yeti or even a Big Cat of Cirencester out there. My local newspaper in the Cotswolds loves to run a ‘Big Cat Spotted’ story every slow news day (there is quite a fat Siamese that sits in the window of a house on Blackjack Street but I don’t think that’s the one causing the commotion). Once, I . . .
Get on with it!
Oh great: first you ask questions and now you’re actually heckling my Foreword . . .
I hate forewords.
Actually, so do I. I groan when I see a big, long foreword before a book. It’s just padding. If a book is any good then it doesn’t need a foreword. They are usually random, wistful musings from an author desperate for anything to delay him having to face that terrifying moment of actually starting to write the book. If anybody really does have any questions, then ask me on Twitter . . .
So stop writing and get on with it.
Alright. Here it is. I hope you enjoy the adventures.
Dom Joly, Cotswolds, 2012