Meet the Vampire (1979) is part of the Eerie Series from Lippincott; we’re going to be tackling nearly all of it over the course of this year. It’s aimed at young readers and is sort of an inheritor of Lippincott’s earlier Weird and Horrible Library. It’s the one book by Georgess McHargue that I am sure I got out of the library as a kid (pretty sure I also read Mummies and Meet the Werewolf, but not certain). Of all the monster writers from the ’60s to the ’90s, I think she was perhaps the best wordsmith, possibly because she was a poet as well.

This covers basically the same ground as Thomas G. Aylesworth’s The Story of Vampires, but it’s a bit better for my money, shooting a bit straighter. Aylesworth addresses kids as kids, McHargue (like Nancy Garden), addresses them as readers. She has a chapter on Vlad the Impaler, of course, and Elizabeth Bathory gets name checked, but she skips Varney and really revels in retelling some less well-known vampire tales, like the one about the Russian soldier and the vampire, which ends with the vampire burning on a pyre and trying to escape as a horde of vermin. She also mentions the Penanggalan and the Chonchon and the New England vampire plague, all of which make me smile.

Even better, the interior illustrations are by Stephen Gammell, of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark fame, and they’re all great (though not quite so gruesome as his more famous work). The cover is a nice scratchboard illustration by Tony Ratkus, whose work I’m otherwise unfamiliar with.