Thought it might be fun to start a Jersey Devil pop-culture thread. Not concerned with the more scholarly works like the McCloy/Miller books or Bill Sprouse's book, more along the lines of that terrible episode of The X-Files from a million years ago. At worst, I'll just talk to myself here 
Anyway, to start it off, I just finished a murder mystery that my buddy lent to me called Who is Killing Doah's Deer? by Jeff Markowitz (2004 - iUniverse, Inc). It's about a widowed reporter for an offbeat magazine (sounds like Weird NJ, but with a massive budget) who spends early mornings driving around a fictional South Jersey town looking for dead deer that have been supposedly killed by the Jersey Devil. Then she writes horribly misleading articles about them (she's supposed to be a crack reporter who went to Princeton, but that part was tough to buy). Somehow, she gets caught up in a story about a local middle school teacher/eco-terrorist who is found dead in the middle of one of these clumps of dead deer. When her best friend is accused of the murder, she takes the case and does some real investigative reporting for once, while still tracking down Siamese triplets, the loch ness monster of the Jersey shore, and other oddity stories.
As a mystery, the twist at the end got me (I don't read a lot of mysteries, so maybe I missed a common one). The Jersey Devil is definitely a minor side character in the book, but he's portrayed fairly traditionally (horse head, bat wings, etc. Doesn't hurt or attack people, just animals). I also like how the writer pulled in a little of the mystery of the pines (old ghost towns and such) without going too overboard, although he may have gotten in over his head when he took the main character to Chatsworth where she sipped coffee at a cafe on the lake.
I wouldn't recommend it as a good book, but it was a fun, light book and I was entertained by it.
Feel free to chime in here. The 13th Child (soooo bad) or The Last Broadcast (I have not seen this one, anyone?)? The Pines by Robert Dunbar or the Jersey Devil comic books by that guy who lived in Stratford whose name eludes me? Go off about the X-Files episode? Other ones that I don't know about?
Anyway, to start it off, I just finished a murder mystery that my buddy lent to me called Who is Killing Doah's Deer? by Jeff Markowitz (2004 - iUniverse, Inc). It's about a widowed reporter for an offbeat magazine (sounds like Weird NJ, but with a massive budget) who spends early mornings driving around a fictional South Jersey town looking for dead deer that have been supposedly killed by the Jersey Devil. Then she writes horribly misleading articles about them (she's supposed to be a crack reporter who went to Princeton, but that part was tough to buy). Somehow, she gets caught up in a story about a local middle school teacher/eco-terrorist who is found dead in the middle of one of these clumps of dead deer. When her best friend is accused of the murder, she takes the case and does some real investigative reporting for once, while still tracking down Siamese triplets, the loch ness monster of the Jersey shore, and other oddity stories.
As a mystery, the twist at the end got me (I don't read a lot of mysteries, so maybe I missed a common one). The Jersey Devil is definitely a minor side character in the book, but he's portrayed fairly traditionally (horse head, bat wings, etc. Doesn't hurt or attack people, just animals). I also like how the writer pulled in a little of the mystery of the pines (old ghost towns and such) without going too overboard, although he may have gotten in over his head when he took the main character to Chatsworth where she sipped coffee at a cafe on the lake.
I wouldn't recommend it as a good book, but it was a fun, light book and I was entertained by it.
Feel free to chime in here. The 13th Child (soooo bad) or The Last Broadcast (I have not seen this one, anyone?)? The Pines by Robert Dunbar or the Jersey Devil comic books by that guy who lived in Stratford whose name eludes me? Go off about the X-Files episode? Other ones that I don't know about?
