FrankiVerse Cafe is open. The frequency is live. The entities have been waiting.

Coffee and Cryptids is the first volume in the FrankiVerse Cafe Paranormal Travel Guide series — the spin-off that grew directly out of the West Virginia Haunted Travel Guide when it turned out that sitting across from Mothman in a cafe booth and asking him how he was doing actually worked, and that he had a great deal to say, and that he ordered house coffee black and meant it.

This is the Earth Edition. Eleven entities. One off-map franchise location below the thermocline. Two hosts who show up to every interview with genuine curiosity, a fully stocked pharmaceutical kit, and the regional food equivalent of a pepperoni roll for every location on the planet.

Franki runs the interviews. She is the one who will look directly at something that has been misidentified for a thousand years and ask it, sincerely and without irony, how it is doing and whether it has had water recently. She means it every time. This turns out to matter.

Franny Lynn manages the pharmaceutical dimension of the operation — the part that makes the interviews possible at all. Her inventory comes through channels that bypass most regulatory frameworks currently in existence. Her supplier is very reliable, very interdimensional, excellent communication except during Mercury retrograde. The pharmaceutical choice is always specific to the entity. The pills work. The interviews happen.

Inside this volume: Mothman confirms he was never trying to frighten anyone. Sasquatch clarifies that he has never been lost. The Jersey Devil explains that the Pine Barrens require care and the care is not optional. The Beast of Gévaudan says something true and difficult about the people of the Gévaudan that has not been said clearly enough in two hundred and fifty years. Black Shuck wants it known that witnessing and causing are not the same thing. Spring Heeled Jack is still sitting with the part that doesn't resolve cleanly and has been for a hundred and twenty years. The Dover Demon confirms the drawing is accurate. The Yeti is clear that the mountains are not a destination. The Chupacabra wants to know why nobody has asked the actual question yet. The Thunderbird says the sky has never been empty. And Nessie, from her regular Thursday evening booth at the Deep Meridian franchise location below the thermocline, says the water is real and she is in it and that is enough.

One chapter is a bust. That chapter is handled with the honesty it deserves, because some things know they belong to somebody, and honoring that is the whole point.

Researched, warm, funny, and deeply weird in the best way — Coffee and Cryptids is for anyone who has ever suspected that the entities the culture got wrong had something specific they wanted to say about it, and that the right question, asked sincerely, with good coffee available, might actually get an answer.

Neurodivergent-coded humor throughout. Cannabis and psilocybin woven in lightly as texture. Writing influences: P.G. Wodehouse, H.P. Lovecraft, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Tone reference: Last Podcast on the Left, if it were run by two women who genuinely wanted to know how the entities were doing and whether they needed anything.

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