Review: “Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood,” Bradley Sides.

Bradley Sides. Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood. California: Montag Press, 2024.

Cryptids and the South just go together. Like shrimp and grits. Like humidity and football. My love for southern mythology and the “hilarious, unsettling, tender, and wise” pulled me directly into this collection of short stories. It’s a foray into magical realism that superimposes the monstrous over the mundane, the wild over the tame, and paints important questions over cryptid symbolism. This is Sides’ second collection of work, published after Those Fantastic Lives. His short stories have been published in BULL, Ghost Parachute, Necessary Fiction, Psychopomp, Superstition Review, and elsewhere.

Despite the rural rogues’ gallery of dinosaurs and vampires, robots and were-sharks, these stories run along a thick vein of family, loss, hope, and creative survival. The images spin around in a sometimes dreamlike creativity, sometimes stark and uncanny reality. Sides’ narration is a flickering flashlight wavering between the horrific and beautiful. As a reader, you sometimes don’t know what you’re looking at until after it has departed. And you’re left alone in the dark.

Sides’ menagerie, to take a phrase from one of the most heartbreaking stories contained in this book, is myriad. Fully half of these lush stories are a study of family and community. There is something perfect in how Sides overlays the oddity of real, lived human life with the larger-than-life descriptions of the supernatural. Fewer still of these stories are about faith, belief, and survival, whether misguided or desperate, while the world continues to turn. And finally, like golden eggs among the monsters, are the folksy tales of hope. Of inspiration. Of brilliant creativity.

I feel almost as if the blurbs on the back of the book didn’t properly portray these stories. Yes, they are all the aspects noted. Yet while reading, I also found a hardness to even the most lighthearted of his works. It is important, after all, to respect the vampires, the monsters, the wilderness. If I were to describe these works, beautiful as they are, I’d label them as being part of a process of tearing.

Early in the book, we read about the tearing of memory in “The Guide to King George,” where a boy replaces his father’s passing with a lake monster and, in the end, must replace himself as time marches on in a kind-of commodification of grief. We read about the literal tearing of clothes and bedsheets to impart memory into a quilt in “Our Patches,” in joyous hope the item will outlast those creating it. In “The Browne Transcript,” we observe the confusion of a warped faith in the rapture, and the resulting tear of rationality from the logical mind of the investigator. We know the heartbreak of the loss of an innocent baby, and a culture that would rather turn its head than observe it.

We all know—or at least have read about—people who move in these circles in the real world. I cannot speak for everyone, but I have experienced these stories in real life. In the news. In my community. The numbness one feels with a new family member that requires more work and a recentering of importance (“Claire & Hank”). The pain of being physically different, even from both parents (“Do You Remember?”). They hit, despite the fantasy or horror, with a striking hardness.

I shed tears twice in this book. Once for the Neverland-esque ritual of transforming those who never had a chance at life into familiars and animals (“Sahar’s roar woke her”) in “Peaches’ Menagerie,” and once, for the exact opposite emotion, for the promise of a continual, forever relationship (“His eyes meet hers on the way down”) in “From 1973.” Both works were a surprise, handled delicately and with poise and—even though I wanted to deny it—well-placed humor. I caught myself wanting to live in a world where these possibilities existed.

Tears don’t come easy for me in a world that seems perpetually on the edge of violence and authoritarianism. I felt numb to “2 Truths & a Lie About the Monsters Atop Our Hill.” The concept of violence against a perceived scary “other” soured me. Perhaps I have watched too many school shootings, or too many war clips, or too much news covering wholesale Capitalistic violence that the symbolism wasn’t needed. It was, perhaps, too on the nose when the angry townsfolk tore through and murdered unresisting dragons because they looked monstrous. It hit me different than the rest of the book. But then, perhaps that was the author’s intent.

Sides’ playfulness toward the format of certain stories also surprised me. It isn’t easy to work within the confines of an essay/quiz in “Nancy R. Melson’s State ELA Exam, Section 1: The Dead-Dead Monster,” or a new hire guidebook in “The Guide to King George,” or the illusion of a choose-your-own-adventure reminiscent of 1990s storytelling in “To Take, To Leave.” Due to the constrictions of said stories, Sides’ storytelling sometimes came up a little short. In “The Guide to King George,” the narrator often came across as rambling about his life, and I found myself pulled out of the narrative when actions were taken to uphold the framework of a “guide.” In “To Take, To Leave,” the storytelling options felt less hopeless and more tacked-on, like window dressing. On the other hand, the essay/quiz format of “Nancy R. Melson’s…” reinforced the symbolic prejudice toward monsters in a way that felt striking and direct, hitting home for me in a way that invited high school memories of poorly acclimated classmates who would rather puff their chests than change their opinions.

In all, Sides’ Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood was a creepfest slam dunk that felt so uncannily like real life I couldn’t look away. At times, this book felt reminiscent of Butterworth’s The Enormous Egg, Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and even an episode of Supernatural. While in turns haunting, unsettling, unwavering, and determined, this collection identified the most unsettling monster of all: us. For those with a love for cryptids, a keen eye for the human condition, and with a kind of dark humor that allows one to laugh at the maw of strangeness, this book is for you. It can be found on many online sites, including Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, and Books-A-Million, or maybe even at your local bookstore.

Chris Heisserer is a twenty-year creative writer and adjunct instructor in the English Department at Jacksonville State University. His pursuit of the weird and wonderful in literature is unending.