Excited to have finally figured this out. This is Nancy Garden's Devils & Demons (1976), and it is maybe the last of the library books I was obsessed with as a kid that left a lasting enough memory for me to track down 35 years later. This one was tough, because while I had extremely vivid memories of Garden's Werewolves, I had no idea she wrote this one. Worse, while I remember the hot pink and green, and the fact that it took some convincing to get my mom to let me take the book out, my memory of the cover got jumbled up with Helen Hoke's Venomous Tales of Villainy and Vengeance (I think). Anyway, somehow, I found it.

Isn't it GREAT? That cover is by Stephen Gammell, who you know from his illustrations for Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. I really adore the fact that The Weird and Horrible Library existed. It even ran 13 volumes! Perfection. The text is a pretty solid survey of how belief in diabolical forces started and evolved over time. I'm currently reading Daniel Cohen's Dealing with the Devil, which covers similar ground, and this actually seems a bit more substantial.

Garden was a cool cat. She wrote a teen lesbian romance called Annie on My Mind (1982) that School Library Journal listed as one of the most influential books of the 20th century. Predictably, it is a commonly challenged book and continues to drive some folks crazy, to the point that Kansas residents in 1993 resorted to burning the book. Garden responded: "Burned! I didn't think people burned books any more. Only Nazis burn books." Righteous.