We wholeheartedly agree with John Rimmer, who in a review in Magonia entitled “A Rather Fishy Business,” calls Merbeings: The True Story of Mermaids, Mermen, and Lizardfolk by Mark A. Hall, Loren Coleman, and David Goudsward, “a very strange book.” Justin Mullis, in AIPT Comics, explains why: “Undoubtedly among the boldest of cryptozoology’s speculative creature creators was the late Mark A. Hall (1946-2016), whose talent for cryptid conjecture is on full display in his posthumously published Merbeings…[The book] represents the culmination of Hall’s lifelong interest in the possibility of amphibious primates…Hall offers readers the cryptozoologist’s equivalent of Pascal’s Wager: believe in monsters and lose nothing if they turn out to not exist, OR doubt their existence and end up looking foolish when physical evidence for them eventually turns up…Observations such as these—supported by copious endnotes and a healthy bibliography of primary and secondary scholarly sources—makes Merbeings a worthwhile addition to any folklorist’s library, irrespective of if you agree with Hall’s wilder contentions about a supposed biological reality behind the mermaid myth.. but as an exercise in speculative creature-building, I’d propose that the mermaid—more than the Sasquatch, Nessie, or even Mothman—embodies the ultimate litmus test for cryptozoologists.”