Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Nicole M. Wolverton writes about A Misfortune of Lake Monsters from CamCat Books.
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Dismissed as Imagination
Those of us of a certain age will remember coveting the Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown series of books that launched back in the late 1980s. In the television ad, a man’s urgent voice declares some phenomenon—psychic powers or ghosts— “dismissed as imagination,” to the detriment of us all. My local library had the whole collection, and my favorite was always the seventh volume, Mysterious Creatures, which included a section on the Loch Ness Monster. Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that over thirty years later I’d have a young adult horror novel featuring a lake monster published.
Maybe the only real surprise is that I didn’t use the Mysterious Creatures volume as a point of research.
A Misfortune of Lake Monsters (July 2, 2024, CamCat Books) tells the story of a high school senior whose college plans are disrupted when her family taps her to take over their generations-old legacy of secretly impersonating their rural town’s lake monster—but when she discovers a very real monster in the lake with a taste for human flesh, she breaks the secret to her best friends so they can find a way to stop the carnage. And when you’re writing about lake monsters—or cryptids in general—it feels imperative to find a way to make them entirely plausible, horror fiction or not.
Cryptozoology is near and dear to my heart even outside of the Time-Life series. I grew up in rural eastern Pennsylvania, fantasizing about strange creatures living in the lake about a mile from my house—but over the years I’ve learned about legendary PA cryptids, primarily sighted in the western part of the commonwealth—the Giwoggle, the Albatwitch, the Squonk. So I started locally, looking for Pennsylvania lake monsters, of which there is one: Raystown Ray, who calls Raystown Lake home. A visit to the lake (about an hour-ish outside of the Philadelphia area, where I currently live) gave me some ideas about setting and about local beliefs in the legend, but considering the lake itself is a reservoir project completed in 1973, it lacked the history I needed.
I cast a wider net. There are dozens of reported lake monsters in the United States. If there’s a lake big enough to potentially support a monster, it likely has some kind of monster legend attached. Probably the most well known is Champ from Lake Champlain, but it’s not all traditional dinosaur-esque marine creatures terrorizing US waters. There are mysterious giant turtles, winged alligator-snakes, a giant eel-pig… even a goat man.
The real question in all these cases is where did these cryptids allegedly come from? There are a not-surprising number of books that discuss various schools of thought—and I am particularly thankful to my local librarians who indulged me in digging up a plethora of excellent sources. The most useful books to me turned out to be those that approach the subject with skeptical wonder (Abominable Science! Origins of the Yeti, Nessie, and Other Famous Cryptids, for instance). There’s enough misinformation and disinformation about science being bandied around over the last decade—and so digging in to really explore what’s scientifically possible versus completely outlandish was not just clarifying, it was fun!
The best research I did, though, brought me back to the Loch Ness Monster and my beloved Time-Life books: I took a trip to Scotland and spent time at Loch Ness. The introductory film at the Loch Ness Centre walked me through 500 million years of history and hoaxes. I was invited to record any sighting I might have during the ferry ride around the loch. I took up a perch in the gorgeous ruins of Urquhart Castle and watched the water, looking for any sign. Did I see anything that might have been Nessie? Maybe… just maybe.
Loch Ness, from the shoreline
If Time-Life wants to hire me to write a new volume on cryptids, I’m available—but for now the result of all this research is plain to see in A Misfortune of Lake Monsters, a book that is lovingly wrapped around everything I learned and saw and did. Have I dismissed lake monsters and other cryptids as imagination after all of that? Might cryptids really exist? That’s maybe not the point, is it? It doesn’t matter if I believe they do. It only matters that they could.
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Nicole M. Wolverton is the author of the young adult horror/suspense novel A Misfortune of Lake Monsters (2024) and the adult psychological thriller The Trajectory of Dreams (2013). She is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer; her short fiction, essays, and creative nonfiction have been published in over forty anthologies, magazines, and podcasts. She served as Editor of Bodies Full of Burning (2021), an anthology of short fiction that centers horror through the lens of menopause. Wolverton grew up in rural Pennsylvania but now lives in the Philadelphia area, where she earned a Masters of Liberal Arts in Horror and Storytelling from the University of Pennsylvania.