FEATURED BOOK: Island of Paradise by Jon Downes

Welcome to a new feature on the CFZ Bloggo. Each week or so we are going to spotlight three of the books from CFZ Press, almost at random, in what could be seen as a cynical marketing ploy, or an attenpt by a tiny publishing house to give a little more exposure to their books. Remember that we are a non profit making organisation, and that any money we do make goes straight back in to fund our programme of research..

So, let's start off with a book of which I am rather fond. My latest tome, Island of Paradise which tells the story of my two expeditions to Puerto Rico in search of the grotesque, blood-sucking, chupacabra. In the end I come up with a theory which I think will prove to be correct, and along the way I encounter crashed UFOs (and remember boys and girls, an unidentified flying object is non necessarily an alien spacecraft, and in this case it almost certainly isn't anithing of the sort), and various other biological mysteries, as well as a political scandal which could have got me into some serious trouble.

The publisher blurb reads:

"In his first book of original research for four years, Jon Downes visits the Antillean island of Puerto Rico, to which he has led two expeditions - in 1998 and 2004. Together with noted researcher Nick Redfern he goes in search of the grotesque vampiric chupacabra, believing that it can - finally - be categorised within a zoological frame of reference rather than a purely paranormal one. Along the way he uncovers mystery after mystery, has a run in with terrorists, art historians, and even has his garden buzzed by a UFO. By turns both terrifying and funny, this remarkable book is a real tour de force by one of the world's foremost cryptozoological researchers."

All very flattering, but I am rather fond of this book. It took me four years to write on and off. I started it on a laptop in a hotel room in Puerto Rico, and four years later - four years during which I nursed my father through his final illness, met and married Corinna, set up CFZ Press and moved the CFZ into our present location in my old family home in North Devon, I finished it.
Here - just for fun - is a chunk of the prologue to give you a feel of the book:

"It was early evening as the surprisingly tiny Boeing 757 flew steadily through the Caribbean dusk. Below us were the blue crystal waters, which in my childhood storybooks were populated by cannibal kings, fearsome pirates, and man-eating sharks. As I have never really grown up, my imagination still tended to view these waters in much the same manner as I had done in my pre-teens. However, as my Socio-political vistas broadened, and my favourite reading started to include Che Guevera, and to my eternal embarrassment, for a few months during my teens, Charles Berlitz, the heroes of the glorious workers and peasants counter-revolution, `Papa` Doc Duvalier, and the Bermuda Triangle, joined Robinson Crusoe, Sir Francis Drake, Biggles, and the cast of Treasure Island in my mental seascape of the Caribbean oceans.

Today, however, as an overweight bearded zoologist, my daydreams went back only half a century to the days when another overweight bearded zoologist - my hero, Gerald Durrell - flew towards another South American airport, and described the delightfully laissez faire attitude of the locals aboard the plane. He wrote how this had been the only aeroplane on which he had travelled, on which he had had to share the cabin space with crates of chickens, and even a trussed-up pig, which were accompanying their owners on the journey.

I looked around me, and like my hero, took a hearty swig from a large tumbler of iced gin and tonic. In these less earthy days there were no chickens and no pig, but the rest of my co-passengers were remarkably familiar to me from Gerald’s writings.

There was the big jolly black lady nearly as wide as she was tall, with her hair bound tightly in a brightly coloured bandana and surrounded by a gaggle of small children.

There was the old farmer returning to his homeland after a visit to relatives in New York.

There were the throngs of children and young people whose chatter was irresistibly reminiscent of the noises of the rainforest, which I would be hearing in only a few short days. The chirruping of cicadas, the raucous squeaking of the mountain tree frogs, and the delightful splishity splashity sound of the tiny mountain waterfalls.

But there were new additions to the human landscape before me. Additions, which I felt that perhaps my mentor would not have recognised, but which I think might have amused him. Sitting near the exit doors on the starboard side were three tall thin and grim looking `Yardies` (well they looked like them anyway). Dark glasses, shoulder-length dreadlocks, and leather jackets, they glowered at the rest of the plane like predatory spiders perched in the corner of their web. A few seats away from them were four young Latino youths, whose t-shirts proclaimed that they were returning from a New York rappers’ convention, joyously shouting rhyming couplets at each other, like tropical birds trading squawks in mid-air. Try as I might I could not make out the words, they were lost forever in the hubbub of humanity, but as I looked around me, and saw specimens from all walks of human life; the policeman handcuffed to his prisoner, the off-duty soldiers on furlough, and even the tall, painfully thin and very old man reading a German newspaper in the corner and looking for all the world like the popular image of a fugitive Nazi war criminal, (when he was certainly just a respectable businessman on holiday), I realised that my mentor had been right; one can learn just as much about animal behaviour by watching an aircraft cabin full of people, as one can do in the most teeming jungle.

We landed at Luis Munoz Marin International Airport just as the last few glimmers of the tropical sun set below the horizon. Surprisingly, for an immigration lounge in an American controlled airport post-9/11, it was practically empty. On the mainland, everywhere you looked there would be policemen and military personnel, often brandishing machine guns, and always glowering at each and everyone of the people who filed past them brandishing their passports as if each one was a potential terrorist. Here there was just a jolly fat black bloke in a uniform which reminded me irresistably of that worn by the park-keeper in one of the old Beano comic strips of the 1960s. I proffered him my passport and he just smiled. “Shit man, you don’t need to do that here”, he grinned. I grinned back and clutching my hand luggage which contained my medication, cigarettes, a change of clothing, half a dozen cds, and a litre and a half of Jack Daniels, and what the bloke on the train the previous day had euphemistically described as a `light picnic lunch` in a garishly coloured paper bag, I made my way to the baggage collection.

Suddenly it was as if I had been transported into the middle of a comedy funfair as designed by Heironymous Bosch. It was chaos. All the people that I had noticed on the aeroplane had converged upon the baggage collection console, and were alternately overjoyed to see their property again, or outraged when - like me - they were told that it had been diverted in transit to Anchorage, Alaska, or some likewise exotic location. The four-man rapping crew had no sooner collected their baggage when out came a beatbox, on came a complex pattern of resounding breakbeats, and they started to dance and sing. The enormous black lady with her hoard of children started to sway rythmically in time to the music, and before long the baggage console was deserted as everybody, including the Martin Boorman lookalike, and the three `Yardies`, decided to stop what they were doing, and watch the free cabaret.

A highly flustered looking individual wearing an American Airlines uniform started to take the flight details of everybody whose luggage had become mislaid, and when it came to my turn I gave my forwarding address as the Windchimes Tavern on Toft Street, San Juan, and oblivious of the fact that I was truly a stranger in a strange land - I had only one change of clothing, and nothing but a litre and a half of whisky, a British Rail pork pie, and $40 to sustain me, I made my way into the night."

Product details
Paperback: 284 pages
Publisher: CFZ Press (14 Jun 2008)
Language English
ISBN-10: 1905723326
ISBN-13: 978-1905723324
Product Dimensions: 23.1 x 15.5 x 1.8 cm

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