Passport to the Supernatural (1973) is probably Bernhardt J. Hurwood’s great work. Subtitled “An Occult Compendium from All Ages and Many Lands,” which I think speaks to the book’s ambition.

Rather than organizing it’s topics by type, Hurwood here opts to go region by region — the Middle East, Greece and Rome, China, Japan and then two catch-all chapters for everything else. It’s a dense book and it doesn’t really have an overarching flow. Rather, it’s a collection of stories, similar to what a folklorist might collect, followed by brief commentary and context. Sometimes these stories are selected from other authors, as is the case in several that are reprinted from Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan. Others are familiar tales fictionalized by Hurwood, as with “The Soldier and the Vampire” (which features the vampire’s turning into a swarm of vermin to escape burning; and the villagers kill the vermin with brooms). It seems like the format and organization and even the font changes from page to page, but rather than being disorientating, I find it engrossing, like sorting through a disorganized library full of only the most wonderful books. If you had to have just one volume of supernatural folklore on your shelf, you could do a lot worse than Passport.

Hurwood’s whole body of work is like this, actually. I liked him least of the monster scribes when I was a kid, in fact, because his tendency to rework his stories into fiction, rather than presenting them in a more journalistic fashion, made them feel less true to me. Which, ironically, I find to be a delightful feature now (because, sorry Young Stu, they were never true). He also had a number of fiction anthologies that were easily confused with his folklore books and I can’t tell you how disappointed I was when I brought one of those home from the library instead of the umpteenth monster encyclopedia.

Monster fiction? For me? No, you misunderstand, I am a monster scholar.