Christopher Golden
The Monster Book
Pocket Books
2000
When I received it I thought to myself, "This is a nice book." I then put it aside thinking that it was going to be a chore to get into. I tried to find episodes of Buffy on TV and set reminders but, since I rarely turn the TV on, I missed them. After finally watching the movie again, I finally got around to looking at the book.
This book is a keeper. Even if you don't care a fig about Buffy, if you are interested in demons, vampires, werewolves, witches, and bogeymen, you'll love this book!
Incarnations of Evil
Besides the interviews with the show's creator, the pictures of the cast (including the monsters), and the episode summaries, this book is full of great information about demons, witches, vampires, and more, in art, in literature, in comic books, and on film. For example, the book contains information about the myth of vampires that I had never heard of before, such as that in Greek folklore, vampires were usually family members who returned from the dead to attend to some sort of unfinished business, generally benign in nature. Vampire-like legends apparently grew up simultaneously in many different cultures.
The book follows the development of and changes in the Vampire legend through early books all the way through Bram Stoker's "Dracula", Anne Rice's vampires, and finally, the vampires fought by Buffy. Did you know the first film adaptations of Bram Stoker's book were in the 1920s in Russia and Hungary? Unfortunately, there are no known copies of these films.
There are references to vampire tales written by Dumas, Bierce, Hawthorne, de Maupassant, and Baudelaire that I've never heard of.
In the 1950s, horror comics were thought to have provoked an increase in juvenile delinquency and a group of comic book publishers agreed to stop publishing them in order to avoid government oversight. In the early sixties, a few publishers who hadn't signed the agreement jumped into the void and began providing horror comics once again. During this period, the public's thirst for eerie tales had to be sated by magazines, movies, and television.
This is just a small taste of what's in this section. Another fascinating section was the one on "demons", which included a history of demons in films and literatures, such as "Rosemary's Baby" and "Damien". There are many movies and books listed which I have missed and will look for now.
Each section is accompanied by a listing of the "Buffy" episodes featuring the particular kind of monster being defined, and how they act either in accordance with or differently from those of legend, and how they have been portrayed in popular culture over time. Other sections are "Ghosts", "Magic Users", "Primals" (werewolves and shapeshifters, for example), "The Walking Dead", and "Bogeymen" (Freddy Krueger, for example).
For Buffy Fans
From the perspective of a "Buffy" fan, a great feature of this book is that it demonstrates the depth of interest on the part of the show's creators in presenting something that is not only entertaining and imaginative, but fits into a widely known and documented mythological structure.
Fans of the show will like having this as a reference, but it is lacking in some respects as a "companion" book to the show. There is no chronological episode listing. Since the episode descriptions are grouped together depending upon whether the monsters in them are invisible people, witches, vampires, or others, it takes a fair amount of browsing around to find related information on the show.
The authors here do not seem to like lists of any kind and all the references are given in narrative form in which the cited films, publications or myths are related to each other, compared and contrasted. This makes it a great book to read, but not necessarily a good reference, because it is difficult to go back and find anything you remember reading about. (There are a few times when it seems the film references are coming at you so swiftly you just have to put the book down for a bit but, for the most part, it's very good reading.) There isn't even an index.
On the plus side, though, there are two color picture sections from the show, and numerous black and white photos accompany the show highlights and narrative sections. The episode summaries, analyses and quotes presented will doubtless give hours of pleasure to the "Buffy" enthusiast, and show a little bit of the sense of humor of the show:
Looks dead. Smells dead. But moving around. Interesting." Oz, in Dead Man's Party, used on the first page of the chapter "Walking Dead".
I think I'm going to have to start watching this!
Conclusion
Despite the fact that I've only seen part of one episode of the TV series, I really liked this book a lot. I think that anyone who has been entertained by the film "Buffy", the movies "Ghost", "Dracula", "Frankenstein", "Reanimator", "Sixth Sense" or those made from some of the books by Stephen King, or who has even passing interest in the history of the portrayal of Good vs. Evil in literature and film, will find at least a section or two of this book well worth reading, if not all of it. It's a wealth of material which is very well presented.
The "Buffy" information is just an added bonus for those who follow the show.
This book is also available at
Amazon.co.uk
Other books by this author, or related books if none are available:
