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The Cryptopedia: A Dictionary of the Weird, Strange, and Downright Bizarre
At the edge of the known world, demons, monsters, and baffling phenomena abound. To help you navigate this mystery-shrouded realm where the supernatural mingles with the paranormal, fright-guides Maberry and Kramer present The Cryptopedia. It divides theotherworldly into chapters, from angels to poltergeists to UFOs and more. The authors decode occult symbols, demystify the art of fortune-telling, and discuss the myriad strange and bizarre forces at work in the Larger World.--From publisher description.
320 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2007
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534 people want to read
About the author
Jonathan Maberry
518 books7,774 followersJONATHAN MABERRY is a NYTimes bestselling author, #1 Audible bestseller, 5-time Bram Stoker Award-winner, 4-time Scribe Award winner, Inkpot Award winner, comic book writer, and producer. He is the author of more than 50 novels, 190 short stories, 16 short story collections, 30 graphic novels, 14 nonfiction books, and has edited 26 anthologies. His vampire apocalypse book series, V-WARS, was a Netflix original series starring Ian Somerhalder. His 2009-10 run as writer on the Black Panther comic formed a large chunk of the recent blockbuster film, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. His bestselling YA zombie series, Rot & Ruin is in development for film at Alcon Entertainment; and John Wick director, Chad Stahelski, is developing Jonathan’s Joe Ledger Thrillers for TV. Jonathan writes in multiple genres including suspense, thriller, horror, science fiction, epic fantasy, and action; and he writes for adults, teens and middle grade. His works include The Pine Deep Trilogy, The Kagen the Damned Trilogy, NecroTek, Ink, Glimpse, the Rot & Ruin series, the Dead of Night series, The Wolfman, X-Files Origins: Devil’s Advocate, The Sleepers War (with Weston Ochse), Mars One, and many others. He is the editor of high-profile anthologies including Weird Tales: 100 Years of Weird, The X-Files, Aliens: Bug Hunt, Out of Tune, Don’t Turn out the Lights: A Tribute to Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Baker Street Irregulars, Nights of the Living Dead, Shadows & Verse, and others. His comics include Marvel Zombies Return, The Punisher: Naked Kills, Wolverine: Ghosts, Godzilla vs Cthulhu: Death May Die, Bad Blood and many others. Jonathan has written in many popular licensed worlds, including Hellboy, True Blood, The Wolfman, John Carter of Mars, Sherlock Holmes, C.H.U.D., Diablo IV, Deadlands, World of Warcraft, Planet of the Apes, Aliens, Predator, Karl Kolchak, and many others. He the president of the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers, and the editor of Weird Tales Magazine. He lives in San Diego, California. Find him online at www.jonathanmaberry.com
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
May 21, 2010
I grabbed this to read about the creatures; some of the other content, the herbs and stones sections in particular, seem a waste of space and I wonder that it was included. The funky art gives it a silly, new age-y, feel; I would prefer that information be presented in a more straightforward manner, I almost expected to find fashion tips and music selections that would help someone project a neopagan lifestyle.
April 28, 2021
This isn't really the kind of book you want to read cover to cover (though I did so). It's also not formatted as a dictionary that's easy to reference. Rather, it divides its subject into thirteen broad chapters, each of which features a few introductory remarks followed by an alphabetical dictionary listing of some related terms, entities, notable people, etc. (in a few cases, these dictionaries are further subdivided into categories; for instance, the listings of gods are divided into separate alphabetical listings for each of several regional mythologies).
If you're the kind of person who likes to read about the weird, you'll probably get something out of this book. It's so broad in scope that it's almost guaranteed you'll find entries related to something you're not already aware of, and that's great. There are downsides to this approach, however. The first is that the book's organization makes it somewhat difficult to find a particular reference you might want to look up (because the book is divided into chapters, a simple alphabetical search will not suffice, and the entries are not cross-referenced or indexed).
More troublesome is the lack of depth dedicated to any particular subject. While that may be necessary in order to fit so many topics into the book, it also means that the entries devoted to any given topic are quite superficial. For example, the entry devoted to "Mothman" (one of the most popular cryptids in recent years and the subject of a famous book and major motion picture, so one might expect it to be one of the better-documented entries) consists only of the description "A tall, vaguely humanoid creature with fiery red eyes and large wings seen in and around Point Pleasant, West Virginia." Not exactly a wealth of information.
That's forgivable given the number of entries. What's less forgivable is that the entries don't provide much to give the reader a head start on further research. Indeed, the book is presented without bibliography and with precious few citations throughout the text. The reader interested in one of the book's topics (which is almost guaranteed to happen from time to time because these are interesting ideas) is on his or her own when it comes to finding out anything more.
The book also fails to give the skeptics their due. Almost without exception, the topics discussed in this book are at least controversial, and it would be useful to learn something about what the "other side" has to say on the subject. Once again, this might be a forgivable omission if the book were merely a listing of these various belief systems. And for the most part, that is indeed what it is. The authors even point out in their introduction that they do not share in all of the beliefs they discuss but don't intend to criticize any of them. Fair enough. However, they break their own advice when they lend explicit support to certain conclusions without giving alternative views a fair hearing. For example, in the introduction to the sixth chapter (concerning parapsychological research), the authors explicitly argue that the skeptics are losing ground in the face of mounting evidence in support of "true psychic abilities." This research is not provided, cited, described, or alluded to in any further detail (and as a skeptic--albeit one with a bit of a soft spot for the hypothetical consideration of fringe ideas and fictional accounts of the supernatural--I'm pretty sure I know why that is).
This problem becomes a bit more important in a seventh chapter that describes numerous alternative medical practices (perfectly appropriate for a book discussing fringe and supernatural belief systems) without describing the medical studies that have thoroughly discredited them. Indeed, the authors occasionally overstep their bounds far enough as to allude to (again without citation) studies supporting the validity of alternative medical practices about which I could cite plenty of studies demonstrating the exact opposite.
In fact, the only times the authors seem to even mention skeptical views is when they seek to discredit them. An entry concerning crop circles claims that, while some could be explained as pranks as the skeptics contend, this is insufficient to explain all crop circles. Whether that's true or not isn't the point. The point, rather, is that if the authors are going to take sides on controversial issues, they owe it to the reader to at least present both sides fairly before giving their own conclusions. It would be better if they presented the claims merely as "some people believe this; other people believe that" without contaminating (some of) the entries with their own opinions. If that were the case, I wouldn't complain about the lack of skeptical information, because a mere listing of the various beliefs some people hold does not require the critical examination of those beliefs in the same way that a work of advocacy does.
Furthermore, the book is not devoid of errors of fact. For example, "Cold Reading" is described as "A psychic reading given by a subject with no previous knowledge of the sitter." While this is true as far as it goes, no discussion of cold reading is even close to complete without acknowledging that it is a term of art specifically used both by magicians and fraudulent psychics to describe a set of a few dozen techniques (primarily psychological and verbal) used to make those readings convincing to the sitter. For another example, the book cites the widely accepted but almost certainly false "fact" that the Ouija board took its name from the French and German (respectively) words for "yes." A minor error, to be sure, but in a book without citations to document its myriad claims, even small errors ought to raise a few eyebrows.
All of that aside, I'm actually quite glad to have this book in my library. While it doesn't make for great reading if you try to tackle it cover-to-cover, and doesn't have the kind of academic rigor that would make it a useful starting point for more serious research, it's a great reference simply to occasionally flip through for inspiration. As a magician and an author, I could easily turn to almost any random page in this book and find some nugget of an idea that I could, with a bit more research or creativity, turn into something productive. And that seems to be its real value.
For that reason, I would recommend you pick up a copy if you're at all interested in these subjects, though I would also recommend you pick up a copy of James Randi's Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural for the skeptical perspective on many of the same topics.
If you're the kind of person who likes to read about the weird, you'll probably get something out of this book. It's so broad in scope that it's almost guaranteed you'll find entries related to something you're not already aware of, and that's great. There are downsides to this approach, however. The first is that the book's organization makes it somewhat difficult to find a particular reference you might want to look up (because the book is divided into chapters, a simple alphabetical search will not suffice, and the entries are not cross-referenced or indexed).
More troublesome is the lack of depth dedicated to any particular subject. While that may be necessary in order to fit so many topics into the book, it also means that the entries devoted to any given topic are quite superficial. For example, the entry devoted to "Mothman" (one of the most popular cryptids in recent years and the subject of a famous book and major motion picture, so one might expect it to be one of the better-documented entries) consists only of the description "A tall, vaguely humanoid creature with fiery red eyes and large wings seen in and around Point Pleasant, West Virginia." Not exactly a wealth of information.
That's forgivable given the number of entries. What's less forgivable is that the entries don't provide much to give the reader a head start on further research. Indeed, the book is presented without bibliography and with precious few citations throughout the text. The reader interested in one of the book's topics (which is almost guaranteed to happen from time to time because these are interesting ideas) is on his or her own when it comes to finding out anything more.
The book also fails to give the skeptics their due. Almost without exception, the topics discussed in this book are at least controversial, and it would be useful to learn something about what the "other side" has to say on the subject. Once again, this might be a forgivable omission if the book were merely a listing of these various belief systems. And for the most part, that is indeed what it is. The authors even point out in their introduction that they do not share in all of the beliefs they discuss but don't intend to criticize any of them. Fair enough. However, they break their own advice when they lend explicit support to certain conclusions without giving alternative views a fair hearing. For example, in the introduction to the sixth chapter (concerning parapsychological research), the authors explicitly argue that the skeptics are losing ground in the face of mounting evidence in support of "true psychic abilities." This research is not provided, cited, described, or alluded to in any further detail (and as a skeptic--albeit one with a bit of a soft spot for the hypothetical consideration of fringe ideas and fictional accounts of the supernatural--I'm pretty sure I know why that is).
This problem becomes a bit more important in a seventh chapter that describes numerous alternative medical practices (perfectly appropriate for a book discussing fringe and supernatural belief systems) without describing the medical studies that have thoroughly discredited them. Indeed, the authors occasionally overstep their bounds far enough as to allude to (again without citation) studies supporting the validity of alternative medical practices about which I could cite plenty of studies demonstrating the exact opposite.
In fact, the only times the authors seem to even mention skeptical views is when they seek to discredit them. An entry concerning crop circles claims that, while some could be explained as pranks as the skeptics contend, this is insufficient to explain all crop circles. Whether that's true or not isn't the point. The point, rather, is that if the authors are going to take sides on controversial issues, they owe it to the reader to at least present both sides fairly before giving their own conclusions. It would be better if they presented the claims merely as "some people believe this; other people believe that" without contaminating (some of) the entries with their own opinions. If that were the case, I wouldn't complain about the lack of skeptical information, because a mere listing of the various beliefs some people hold does not require the critical examination of those beliefs in the same way that a work of advocacy does.
Furthermore, the book is not devoid of errors of fact. For example, "Cold Reading" is described as "A psychic reading given by a subject with no previous knowledge of the sitter." While this is true as far as it goes, no discussion of cold reading is even close to complete without acknowledging that it is a term of art specifically used both by magicians and fraudulent psychics to describe a set of a few dozen techniques (primarily psychological and verbal) used to make those readings convincing to the sitter. For another example, the book cites the widely accepted but almost certainly false "fact" that the Ouija board took its name from the French and German (respectively) words for "yes." A minor error, to be sure, but in a book without citations to document its myriad claims, even small errors ought to raise a few eyebrows.
All of that aside, I'm actually quite glad to have this book in my library. While it doesn't make for great reading if you try to tackle it cover-to-cover, and doesn't have the kind of academic rigor that would make it a useful starting point for more serious research, it's a great reference simply to occasionally flip through for inspiration. As a magician and an author, I could easily turn to almost any random page in this book and find some nugget of an idea that I could, with a bit more research or creativity, turn into something productive. And that seems to be its real value.
For that reason, I would recommend you pick up a copy if you're at all interested in these subjects, though I would also recommend you pick up a copy of James Randi's Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural for the skeptical perspective on many of the same topics.
March 28, 2010
This is one of the few books I will keep. It isn't much for a straight read and it would be a great reference book if it had a searchable index. If you have any questions regarding the supernatural the answer will probably be in here. It is divided up into chapters for different kinds of phenomenon so this helps find like material.
August 28, 2009
Great read of the supernatural junkie. Incredible research and loads of interesting facts.
May 31, 2011
After reading Zombie CSU by Jonathan Maberry I was hooked. I had to read more of his works. I managed to find this one tucked away on the bottom shelf in a Books A Million collecting dust. Score. I ran home fired up a smoke and grabbed a beverage went out on the back porch and started reading. This one is gold for cryptid researchers. Maberry again dumped a ton of research into this book that made this one awe inspiring. Art work was included in it that was just as jaw dropping. Essay's were collected as well to help bring this all together. This book packs it all in!
December 15, 2011
Both informative and very interesting, this book is perfect for the cryptology-minded individual. I picked up my copy a couple of years ago, and it's been sitting within reach every time I need to look up some mythology. I recommend giving this a browse if you're into this kind of thing, since it covers some things even I had never heard of.
February 18, 2016
A great primer in all things supernatural, from mythology and folklore to extra-terrestrials and parapsychology. As a writer, I find it a great starting point for research or inspiration. The only flaw is the lack of an index in the back.
April 5, 2010
I loved this book. Great read. Awesome reference guide.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews