This Week's Travel Reading

Of all of the Universal monsters, the Creature from the Black Lagoon has always been my favorite.

Aside from being the coolest looking of the bunch, he also had an organic believability that Dracula and the Frankenstein Monster just didn't. I could believe such an animal existed--and, for however brief a time, I did believe not only that he existed, but that he lived in the lagoon in nearby Humboldt Park. (Well, it was a lagoon, and the water was murky enough to be black...the logic of a 10-year-old.)

The novel pictured above was written for the original movie's premiere in England in 1954 but, for whatever reason, was not published in America until a couple of years ago. It seemed appropriate for the waning days before All Hallow's Eve.