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Merbeings
The True Story of Mermaids, Mermen, and Lizardfolk

by Mark A. Hall, Loren Coleman, and David Goudsward

Trade Paperback, 200 Pages, 15 Illustrations

$16.95, ISBN: 978-1-949501-27-8

Genre(s): Cryptozoology

Put aside your notions of beings half-human and half-fish, for there are no such things.

Put aside for the time being your fears of things wet and strange, said to be reptilian in nature, which emerge from swamps and rivers and oceans to walk among us.

The answers to these mysteries you find in this book will surprise you. They have an ancient ancestry and a story of survival that we are only now beginning to uncover.

Join us as we reveal this journey of discovery in these pages.

About the Author:


MARK A. HALL, who served in the US Army as a Russian translator in Cold War Berlin, was an author whose challenging intellectual insights into cryptozoology covered a span of fifty years. He passed away in September 2016.

LOREN COLEMAN is the founder and director of the nonprofit International Cryptozoology Museum in Maine. Among his many books is True Giants, also co-authored with Mark A. Hall. 

DAVID GOUDSWARD is a historian, editor, and author, as well as an expert on H. P. Lovecraft. His latest book on cryptozoology is Sun, Sand, and Sea Serpents.



Preface From Legend to Reality by Mark A. Hall
Chapter 1 The Lure of the Mermaid
Chapter 2 Oreopithecus
Chapter 3 North American Native Accounts
Chapter 4 North America
Chapter 5 South America and the Caribbean
Chapter 6 Europe
Chapter 7 Asia
Chapter 8 Africa
Chapter 9 Oceania
Chapter 10 The Mysterious Ones
Chapter 11 1988: The Year of the Lizardman
Chapter 12 Lizardmen of the Carolinas
Afterword What Can We Learn? by Mark A. Hall

Appendix 1 In Memory of Mark A. Hall by Loren Coleman
Appendix 2 The Mermaid Motif at the Start of the 20th Century by Charles M. Skinner
Appendix 3 Along the Trek: A Popular Summary by Loren Coleman

Bibliography
Index

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What they're saying:

"Undoubtedly among the boldest of cryptozoology’s speculative creature creators was the late Mark A. Hall (1946-2016), whose talent for cryptid conjecture is on full display in his posthumously published Merbeings: The True Story of Mermaids, Mermen, and Lizardfolk (2023). Recently brought to press by Anomalist Books under the editorial guidance of fellow cryptozoologists Loren Coleman and David Goudsward, Merbeings runs just shy of 200 pages and represents the culmination of Hall’s lifelong interest in the possibility of amphibious primates...Hall offers readers the cryptozoologist’s equivalent of Pascal’s Wager: believe in monsters and lose nothing if they turn out to not exist, OR doubt their existence and end up looking foolish when physical evidence for them eventually turns up...Observations such as these—supported by copious endnotes and a healthy bibliography of primary and secondary scholarly sources—makes Merbeings a worthwhile addition to any folklorist’s library, irrespective of if you agree with Hall’s wilder contentions about a supposed biological reality behind the mermaid myth.. but as an exercise in speculative creature-building, I’d propose that the mermaid—more than the Sasquatch, Nessie, or even Mothman—embodies the ultimate litmus test for cryptozoologists." — Justin Mullis, AIPT Comics

"This is a very strange book." — John Rimmer, "A Rather Fishy Business," Magonia

"The authors did their research. The book is filled with interesting stories, with sources given in the chapter notes. Another good point is that Indigenous sources are, whenever possible, referred to by tribe or group names, vs the still-too-common 'the Indians around Lake Powell say…' approach of lazy writers. They wisely avoid tying their idea too closely to the aquatic ape theory proposed by Hardy and expanded on by Morgan: they mention it just enough to make it a possible source of support without being dragged down by its universal rejection. Finally, they make a worthy effort to collect information from all over the world, avoiding being hemmed in by relatively recent Western motifs." — Matt Billie, Matt's Sci/Tech Blog


 

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