Book Nook: The Big Book of Monsters - The Creepiest Creatures from Classic Literature

I recently had the chance to review The Big Book of Monsters: The Creepiest Creatures from Classic Literature. This is a great book for anyone who enjoys the dark side of classic stories - or for people with kids who enjoy monsters, as it makes a great starting point for reading more serious literature.

I saw this in action. My daughter sometimes is a little intimidated by classics, because they seem long and boring. But as she learns about monsters, she's more intrigued to find out about the back story (or the original story).

I was given permission to reprint parts of the Dracula chapter so you could get an idea.

Dear DraculaUp through the early nineteenth century, many novels were “epistolary novels” that took the form of a series of letters. The entire text of Frankenstein (1818), for example, is a letter written by an arctic explorer to his sister, to which he has attached Victor Frankenstein’s confessions.
Dracula is innovative in that it contains diary entries, letters, ship logs, newspaper clippings, telegrams, and transcriptions of “phonograph” records all gathered together like

a dossier of evidence. It looks at first more like someone’s research files than a novel—possibly Dr. Van Helsing’s? 
By building a book around documents, Bram Stoker lends verisimilitude to an otherwise completely unbelievable story. That is, he makes the story appear to be true, even though we know it’s just a novel. 
Before DraculaVampires were incredibly popular throughout the nineteenth century, and Dracula is just the capstone of a century of blood-drinking stories. Such as:
• Christabel by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1816). Young Christabel lives with her father in an isolated castle. One day, they take in Geraldine, a mysterious woman “most beautiful to see.” But there’s something weird about Geraldine. The dog hates her. She can “the bodiless dead espy” (she can see ghosts). And she has a strange, malignant power over Christabel. Although Coleridge never says that Geraldine is a vampire, she sure acts like a vampire. She certainly influenced all the vampire stories that came after.
• “The Vampyre” by John Polidori (1819). The same dare that produced Frankenstein (see p. 55) also produced this vampire tale. The vampire, Lord Ruthven, is a gentleman who feasts on the blood of beautiful women, and the story is similar to a poorly written version of Dracula, with one wonderful difference: Lord Ruthven always wins! No one can stop him, and he just feasts on any character he wants and then slips away.
• Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1872). In rural Austria, a nobleman lives in a castle with his young daughter, Laura. One day, there is a carriage accident on the road nearby, and the family takes in a recovering girl just about Laura’s age. This is Carmilla, and she and Laura become inseparable—at least in part because Carmilla is secretly a vampire, and every night she sneakily drinks Laura’s blood. (You can tell Le Fanu borrowed a lot from Christabel!) 

This makes a great gift for anyone who loves Halloween, and this time if year is perfect for learning more about monsters and reading the classic stories that made them part of our folklore!