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Hi, my name is Robert Lamb, and this is The Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time.

As you probably know, I love a good monster manual, I love a good bestiary, and I recently picked up an especially imaginative book by German fantasy and horror illustrator Yanna Heidersdorf titled

Dr. C. Lilifisk's Explorations in Cyrenology, A Guide to Mermaids, and Other Under the Sea Phenomena.

Purported to have been written by sirenologist Dr. Cecilia Lilifisk, who is described as,

quote, most definitely a real person, the book guides readers through a fanciful and horrifying

imagined world of mermaids, sirens, gill people, and related creatures.

One of the things I love about this book is the way it fully embraces the weirder and, from our vantage point, horrific details of marine life, and folds them into its treatment of mermaids, mythic and folkloric beings that are based in a very anthropocentric view that populated the ancient seas with mere reflections of terrestrial and human life.

So the fantastic beings of the sea in this book are never mere women of the deep,

but bizarre creatures whose human likenesses are infused with all manner of underwater mimicry,

predation, and camouflage.

For just one example, I'd like to discuss the Hortis,

a creature from the latter portions of the book that deal with denizens of the Lightless Midnight Zone.

The main illustration for this entry depicts a mermaid resting on the sea floor,

her chin on crossed arms as if in slumber of some sort.

Her back, however, is a garden of corals and sea anemones growing out of her body,

thriving with various other deep water organisms.

An accompanying image depicts the hortus's eye sockets full of sessile organisms and skin that is seemingly ravaged as well by the growth of such life forms.

As the entry describes, the hortis is herself a sessile habitat for the various organisms that inhabit her body and is whalefall incarnate.

Whale fall, you might remember, occurs when the remnants of a whale cadaver sink to the ocean floor in deep water, creating an oasis ecosystem

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