Monster Books # 1: Monsters Galore ‘resurrected’ by Bernhardt J. Hurwood (Fawcett/Gold Medal, 1965)

One curious phenomenon birthed by the commercial imperatives of mid 20th century paperback publishing is that of what I like to call MONSTER BOOKS; hastily thrown together compendiums of public domain short stories and folkloric / paranormal blather, no doubt intended to capture the attention of ghoulish, impressionable young boys and girls left alone in supermarkets and corner shops whilst their parents took care of hum-drum grown-up business.

Ranging across decades and continents, these rarely acknowledged books remain pretty ubiquitous on the second hand market, and, naturally enough, I generally can’t resist ’em. Despite the haste and cheapness of their production, they’re often actually pretty great reads too, assembled with admirable care and attention by their editors/compilers.

I mean, just imagine you’re a struggling writer with a taste for the stranger side of life, and some editor from Gold Medal calls you up out of the blue and says, “hey Bernie, can you get us about two hundred pages of copyright-free stuff about MONSTERS by a week on Thursday?” Boy, can you EVER. Dream gig, right?

That, presumably, is the call that the venerable Bernhardt J. Hurwood received sometime in 1965, and, as you can see from the scans below, he really went to town on it. Not only do we get M.R. James, Lafcadio Hearn, Sir Walter Scott and Ambrose Bierce, but also original retellings by the editor (sorry, ‘resurrector’) of tales sourced from China, Japan, Arabia, Greece and Siberia… amazing stuff. Whilst I haven’t managed to scan them, the text is also interspersed with blurry reproductions of images from Goya, Kuniyoshi, Hokusai, Brueghel, medieval wood carving, and an etching of “two Mongolian demons”.

Just imagine the impact this “United Nations of virulence,” as Hurwood dubs it in his introduction, could have had on some culturally deprived child out in the boondocks somewhere. Mr Hurwood, we salute you!

As you will note, things take a darker turn toward the end of the book, as Hurwood goes off on a bit of a “of course man is the only true monter” tip, throwing in some historical accounts of serial killers, cannibals and the like alongside such borderline supernatural cases as that of Elisabeth Báthory, not to mention the unfortunately named Johannes Cuntius, a medieval ‘vampyre’ whose unsavoury antics are reported here, sans context, in what appears to be an English translation of a contemporary(?) eye witness account.

Needless to say, it is this stuff, more-so than the were-bears and vampire cats, which would probably have given me nightmares had I stumbled across this book in my youth.

Finally, a quick word on the cover design. Incorporating a rough sketch from legendary illustrator Harry Bennett, nothing here is terribly remarkable from a technical POV, but it just looks really great, with that big, blobby lettering and the bright colours and everything. I often leave this one out on display in the living room, and I never get tired of looking at it.