Review: Beasts!

Beasts!
Various

Fantagraphics Books
Street: 01.31

This beautifully bound and illustrated book fills its pages with the prompt that each artist capture a creature from mythological or folkloric storytelling; the cultural entities—”still thriving or extinct”—that fill our closets and deep recesses of our minds. The product is outstanding in its anecdotal accounts of beast history, stretching from the well known beasts—The Unicorn and Loch Ness Monster—to the bizarre—Bapets (“Malefic females…last recorded in the North American deserts of southwestern Utah and southeastern Nevada…said to prey on humans (particularly small children), the Bapets lure toddlers to suckle, then poison them with their lethal milk.”); breathtaking in its artwork, artists from every discipline participate, Keith Andrew Shore and Kenneth Lavallee are among the few greats throughout. Beasts! is a perfect coffee table book that will leave anyone deeply enthralled and entertained in the myth culture that thrives off the fears and fascinations of civilizations. –Senator Spencer