This is the stuff right here. Monsters are the best, so it stands to reason that Usborne’s All About Monsters (1977) is the best in the series. It follows the same format as the previous volumes, mixing scary tales with just enough scientific rumination to make it seem to be a plausibly “educational” book. Except, you know, with buckets of blood.

Highlights include a bloody-mawed Minotaur, a bloody-mouthed T-rex, a bloody-mouthed werewolf, Grendel about to tear a fool in two and John Lambton pretty much drenched in claret. A lot of the art in here brings an intensity that anticipates what’s on display in the Rodney Matthews-illustrated mythology books Usborne in the mid-’80s (though those books are bloodless, as far as I can recall). I genuinely found this book scarier than the ghost book as a kid because it impressed upon me the fact that monsters would probably eat me.

The real star of the show, though, was a two-page spread at the back of the book titled “A Dictionary of Monsters,” which was an alphabetical list of all the cool monsters, most of which weren’t present in the main book, accompanied by one-line summaries. Never underestimate the power of a list, especially in the hands of an already monster-obsessed pre-teen boy. I most definitely employed this thing at the library and in conjunction with my Monster Manual and any other monster books I had to hand. This is the sort of thing that inspires a kid to bring a notebook and a pen with him on family outings so he can list every single monster he can think of rather than listening to whatever the adults are talking about and then, 30-something years later, compel them to write a whole book on monsters. They should put warnings on these things.