In the grand pantheon of cryptids, there’s no debate as to who holds the highest reign: Sasquatch, Mothman, the Loch Ness Monster, Chupacabra. But there’s always those other cryptozoological oddities that inspire the imagination and yet never seem to warrant the research or museums the others do, despite how much I would love to see a Fresno Nightcrawler museum. There is, though, an even older cryptid that maintains a furloughed cultural awareness despite the legend of it dating back to the 1700s. And that’s where James Tynion IV, Steve Fox, Pitor Kowalski, Brad Simpson, and Tom Napolitano’s Let This One Be a Devil expands upon the legend.

The sun never shines in the pines and it shines even less for Henry Naughton. He’s just returned home from city after his father’s passing to help his mother and younger brother, but he does feel out of place after being away at college for so long. And even though he grew up in south Jersey like the rest of his family, he’s still very much an outsider since he can’t tell the difference between an owl, a fox, or something else that was outside killing their chickens in the middle of the night. But then maybe he isn’t completely out of his mind as the newspaper he finds in town describes a beast stalking the woods with wings, horns, and hooves that recalls the old legends of the Leeds Devil.

Cryptozoological history is a hard thing to pin down since so much of it is rumor, conjecture, and half-remembered accounts in a newspaper roughly eight years ago. But there’s been this persistence of the Jersey/Leeds Devil mythology that has kept it going for multiple centuries and much of that could be down to how it began: as a story. Before pictures or videos, there was the story of a woman giving birth to her thirteenth child and yelling “let this one be a devil” as it was born. From there, the child mutated, spawning wings and horns before flying out the window to thrive in the pines from then on. Let This One Be a Devil expands from that point, showing us the monstrous birth while giving us the effects of it over 170 years later as we experience it terrorizing south Jersey. As much as this is a story, it fits into cryptid history just as much as any other story—we get the mood and feel more than whatever truth may exist as their core.

Writers and illustrators always seem to come back to cryptids at some point. In the mystery of them—the nebulous origins and histories—we find a story that can hold almost anything. We get a mood just from mentioning certain ones and can see stories branch out in dozens of different directions due to their versatility. And mentioning one that hasn’t been in the cultural zeitgeist for a decade? That only invites more stories to keep the legend going for decades more. 

Get excited. Get in the pines. 

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, 510, & 651) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.