Occultober Day 28 Cryptid Zoo by Gerry Griffiths
Occultober Day 28 Cryptid Zoo by Gerry Griffiths
Gerry Griffiths knows how to set up a horror story. In this novel about an eccentric zoo featuring legendary creatures like the sasquatch, the thunderbird, and the kraken in a Jurassic Park style environment, the first half of the novel is all about creating that feeling of uh-oh. As our main family tours the exhibits and the guide happily talks about how this animal is super bright, likes to solve problems, and can survive out of the water for short periods of time, the reader is happily imagining how all of those precious little talents are going to turn into a nightmare for the characters in about fifty pages. It’s a tremendous amount of fun, and Griffiths sets the stage for a couple dozen of these bizarre creatures to get loose and wreak havoc on our cast of tourists and zoo employees.
When the animals begin their inevitable escape the tension grows dramatically. The first deaths begin to occur, followed by the first narrow escapes, until finally the expected chaos is rolling across the zoo and our various groups of heroes are struggling valiantly to survive. I only have two complaints. The first is that I just can’t imagine that any zoo would set up its electronic locks to open if the power went out. I mean, think about that for a moment. Zoos do not want the lions and tigers (or in this case, the flying snakes and the Chupacabra) escaping every time there was a power outage. And it wasn’t necessary. The first breakouts had already occurred in completely believable ways. Those monsters could have ended up freeing the others as a natural result of their destructive behavior.
My second complaint is that the novel ends too quickly. There is a ton going on and it’s all really interesting and I would have liked to see a lot more of it. The cryptids were already introduced and I could have happily read another hundred pages of our cast of heroes surviving their encounters with them. But then, many of the monsters escape into the wild so maybe Griffiths ended it where he did so he could have a sequel.
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