Here it is. Resting comfortably between the covers of Amazing Monster Tales, No. 4: Into the Briny Deep is the most titanic earthly creature of all time. After years of reading books and comics about swamp things, man-things, giant lizards, great apes and cyclopes, I have finally stumbled upon the greatest primordial monster the world has ever seen. I’m referring to the Brobdingnagian beast from Lee Allred’s short story “Murmuration of a Darkening Sea.” 

The thing lurked for uncountable eons beneath the sea. Now on land, the green black waves of water and brine seemed to shift and wriggle into one sinuous monster born from the deepest fathoms. 

The composite creature wasn’t made of mere pisciforms of flesh and bones and fishy scales, said Allred. “It was made of the sea water itself, translucent iridescent things not bound by the laws of nature.”

There wasn’t anything else in the latest edition of Amazing Monster Tales that compared to Allred’s “great murmuration from the deep.” The creature was a bit Lovecraftian, I have to admit, but it was still a unique and wondrous creation all its own. 

That said, however, the mighty leviathan in Grayson Towler’s story was remarkable as well. “Crotar” looked like a mutant Sperm whale with a dash of Humpback, Orca, dolphin and a dozen other marine mammals thrown in for good measure. “It was as if some essence of each animal, from the mightiest of the great whales to the humblest porpoise, had been drawn together and assembled into a single Olympian entity,” observed the author. 

The latest monster anthology from editors DeAnna Knippling and Jamie Ferguson also contained compelling stories about a Mediterranean sea queen, a lovelorn (horny?) sea dragon, a shark woman and a Ponyo-like fish boy. “The Late Bloomer” by coeditor Ferguson was about a young man and his family who vacationed yearly by the seashore. Only later, with the help of his girlfriend, did he realize how important the sea was to himself and his family.

And finally: There’s a little bit of Disney’s The Little Mermaid in “Blood and Water” by Alethea Kontis. Instead of being a beloved mermaid like young Ariel, Kontis’s siren was death personified. She was the shark, she was the thing to be afraid of. 

Rose was a siren who drank the blood of her victims. It wasn’t just the blood she craved, said Kontis, it was everything. She needed the sense and the feelings, the emotions and the pain, the good and the bad. She needed to feel love. She consumed souls to fill the barren places inside her. 

She finally gets what she needs when she’s introduced to her benefactor’s young daughter. The ending is hopelessly tragic, but you know what they say: “Love is a wonderful and horrible thing.”

[ Amazing Monster Tales, No. 4: Into the Briny Deep / Edited by DeAnna Knippling and Jamie Ferguson / First Printing: April 2023 / ISBN: 9798391563198 ]