Boing Boing has a good new posting on the just-released Creature From the Black Lagoon novel.

Cory Doctorow writes: "If you’re looking for a fun little paperback to take you away from your life for a couple hours, you need look no further."

Perhaps we all will need this after the election is over today…

As I’ve mentioned at Cryptomundo before, the original concept for the movie developed from the excitement in the early 1950s that surrounded the Comoros Islands (near Madagascar) discovery of a "living fossil," the coelacanth. After its initial find in 1938, and the eventual acceptance that an animal thought extinct for 65 millions was still alive today, the race was on to find the next specimen. When that second coelacanth was found in 1952, it became a bigger worldwide media event that the capture of the first.

"Creature From the Black Lagoon" was a graphic result of the public’s interest in this grand adventure story, as many at the time felt the coelacanth was only the tip of the iceberg in terms of future "living fossils" to be encountered. Put in context, it is easy to see why Ivan T. Sanderson and Bernard Heuvelmans, in the 1940s and 1950s, would formulate the notion of and coin the word "cryptozoology," then.

I mentioned this novel earlier here on September 9, 2006, noting:

There is a new cryptofiction novel, Creature From The Black Lagoon: Time’s Black Lagoon.

Book Description

In 1954, an expedition found what seemed to be a missing link in the evolutionary chain: an ancient, immensely powerful amphibian creature. Scientists tried to tame it, break its will, and even change its very being with surgery and torture, but the beast rebelled, killing nearly all in its way. But was the creature truly a throwback, a freak survivor of some prehistoric era — or was it something more?

Six decades later, one scientist attempts to find out, using a time machine to journey into the past. What he finds not only shatters his vision of what the Creature might be, but could change the history of the human race forever. Paul Di Filippo reinvents the Creature with a tale of time travel, horror, and mystery that blends Cold War science fiction with today’s cutting edge cyberpunk.