Fiona may be a magical creature or an escapee from a mental institution who's taken a liking to Dom, either because he's the first one she's come across in the outside world or because the two of them look as cozily built for each other as mating herons.
The human being, he wistfully reflects, "may be a less rudimentary creature than the sea urchin or even the whale, but we do lack a number of essential organs and notably possess none that will serve for kissing".
Erich, the central character, is a little boy living in the Manor, a grand house close to the Gulf of Finland and surrounded, beyond its disciplined parkland and lake, by a forest once inhabited by bears and still haunted by Forest Uncle, the King of the Forest, who may be an imaginary creature, a phantom, but who is real to Erich.
The elusive story, which begins and ends in train travel and takes in a sojourn in a ditch (watched by a creature who may be a goat) and a spell as an attendant in a grand house, is easier to follow than it is on the page, and yet certain layers and ambiguities become more apparent.
The resulting creature may be a more mammoth-like version of today's pachyderms, but it won't be the real deal.
It is possible that the discovered creature may be a new species, or possibly even genus.
If advances in microfishing continue, there may be a whole new world of creatures to imitate.
Sightings of the Siberian Snowmen have increased three-fold over the past 20 years, prompting scientists at Moscow's Darwin Museum to speculate that there may be a small population of these creatures.
The Earth, or Central World, stands in water held on the back of a colossal creature that may be a turtle, a huge fish, a bull, or a mammoth.
As Foster investigates the tenebrous maze of the ship, it soon becomes clear that they are Not Alone, though viewers acquainted with the dark goings-on in the British thriller The Descent may be a little disappointed at the unearthly creatures lurking in the shadows – a flagrant rip-off, in short.
