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Title: The Werewolf Book: The Encyclopedia of Shape-Shifting Beings by Brad Steiger, Franklin Ruehl ISBN: 1-57859-078-7 Publisher: Visible Ink Pr Pub. Date: August, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.5 (22 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Slapdash compendium for the gullible
Comment: Brad Steiger has been cranking out monster books since at least the 1960s. Most of his stuff was published in the form of lurid, mass-market paperbacks, heavy on breathless prose but light on actual research. This book is no different. For an indication of the level of research in this book, consider that Steiger actually footnotes articles from The National Enquirer! The editors at the publishing house should have had the good sense to remove those passages. They didn't, so you should take this book with a big grain of salt. The tome feels like a cut-and-paste job. Why all of the irrelevant junk about serial killers? What does Jefferey Dahmer have to do with werewolves anyway? This book has one saving grace: It contains a lot of good data about werewolf movies (although someone needs to tell Steiger that "The Howling" was not quite the "Citizen Kane" of horror films that he seems to think it is)--and it does have a lot of cool photographs in it. Overall, though, it's a disappointment. It's a shame because werewolf lore is interesting, and there's certainly no shortage of material. This could have been a good book. Sadly, the project was turned over to the wrong man.
Rating: 1
Summary: Aliens are not Werewolves!
Comment: As a fan of Mr. Steiger's other books, I can assure you that 'The Werewolf Book' is far from his best work. The whole book has a rushed, padded feeling, as if Mr. Steiger were desperately trying to produce a book of a certain length before his deadline hit. Mr. Steiger's eclectic nature usually helps him produce works where ever-varying strange vistas beckon to you, keeping your appetite whetted and boredom at bay. His roving habits work against him in 'The Werewolf Book,' rendering him unable to keep his focus. I have to agree with what so many other reviewers are saying: this book has a serious problem of wandering far from its topic.
Too many serial killers, way too much about Bigfoot, and why are aliens even here? It is true that a few of the serial killers earned nicknames such as "the werewolf killer," and it is quite common to mention them in other werewolf studies, but Mr. Steiger goes overboard. His reasoning seems to go something like this: 'serial killers kill people, and werewolves kill people, therefore all serial killers are symbolic werewolves and this somehow has something to do with the evil that lurks inside all of humanity.' I've seen the same point made far better in other books, and in far less space. Bigfoot, Yeti, Sasquatch and other "mystery primate" stuff is also pretty thinly connected to the main topic. He doesn't even cover any sightings of Bigfoot-like creatures that do actually shape-shift (yes, there are reports of such things, read 'Story in the Snow' by Lunetta Woods). Instead, Mr, Steiger's reasoning seems to be: 'movie werewolves look a lot like Bigfoot, therefore every critter of this type is closely connected with werewolves and my readers won't mind if I fill one-sixth of the book with a standard rehash of all the basic Bigfoot facts.'
Then, I became really upset when I saw the aliens. The werewolf movie guide in the back of the book was padded heavily with alien movies. Why? Well, in most cases, it was movies about aliens that looked human or could take over human bodies, so even if there was no shape-shifting in the movie proper, it was sometimes theoretically implied as occurring off-screen or before the movie began. Also, Mr. Steiger considers mind-control to be shape-shifting, which it is not. While triumphantly padding his film directory with alien movies, he ignores many movies in which the aliens actually physically shape-shift in the movie proper, seeming to favor highly questionable entries such as 'Lifeforce' (based on the novel 'Space Vampires' by Colin Wilson) and also favoring older alien films. He also throws in plenty of movies about monsters that do not shape-shift, such as lots of "Swamp Thing," "Gill Man" and "Bigfoot" movies.
In summary, the author spends far too much time discussing creatures only slightly related to werewolves, and even then, he usually just discusses the basic facts about these creatures rather than examining the connections to shape-shifting lore that do exist. I hope that if 'The Werewolf Book' is ever republished in the future, it will have a less misleading title. In format, 'The Werewolf Book' somewhat resembles another book of Mr. Steiger's that, in my opinion, is much better: 'Out of the Dark,' a compilation of folklore, mythology and cryptozoology, concentrating on monsters. I think that a title similar to 'Out of the Dark' would have been more appropriate for 'The Werewolf Book.' With a different title, it might have been a halfway decent general monster and horror encyclopedia, the kind aimed at a teen audience or those adults looking for an introductory work, and in this case it would have merited three stars. But with the misleading title and the author's inability to focus, I'm afraid that I can't give it more than one star. There is nothing I hate more than buying a book and then discovering that it is mostly about something else.
Rating: 5
Summary: I rate this incredible book 10 STARS!
Comment: My Buddy and I have both read the Werewolf Book and we think it is a great book. We've also read a number of other books by Brad Steiger over the years, and when we read through the reviews for the Werewolf/Shapeshifter Encyclopedia, we started to laugh at some of the criticisms and we figured out that those guys who wrote the negative reviews must be other writers who want to put Steiger down for personal reasons or people who never even read the Werewolf book.
One so-called critic says that Steiger thinks the movie "The Howling" is the "Citizen Kane" of horror films and implies that the film is not really that good. What Steiger really says is that the film is loaded with in-jokes for horror buffs and probably written with tongue-in-cheek.
Another criticism is that Steiger has been "cranking out" monster books since the 1960s. A check of his bibliography lists only one other monster book before the Werewolf Book, "Monsters Among Us."
The cover blurb says that Steiger became really interested in werewolves when his grandpa took him to see "The Wolf Man," and the critic implies that this was Steiger's only credentials to write the encyclopedia. We know that movie came out in 1941 and we know that Steiger is about 70 years. Say Steiger saw Wolf Man when he was around eight or nine, that's around 60 years to be fascinated by a subject and to spend a whole lot of time researching it.
Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion of any book...but we think people should at least read a work before they criticize it.
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Title: Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead by J. Gordon Melton ISBN: 157859071X Publisher: Visible Ink Pr Pub. Date: December, 1998 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: A Field Guide to Demons, Fairies, Fallen Angels, and Other Subversive Spirits by Carol K. Mack, Dinah Mack ISBN: 080506270X Publisher: Henry Holt & Company, Inc. Pub. Date: October, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Complete Book of Werewolves by Leonard R. N. Ashley ISBN: 1569801592 Publisher: Barricade Books Pub. Date: 01 July, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Half Human, Half Animal: Tales of Werewolves and Related Creatures by Jamie Hall ISBN: 1410758095 Publisher: 1stBooks Library Pub. Date: July, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Essential Guide to Werewolf Literature (A Ray and Pat Browne Book) by Brian J. Frost ISBN: 0879728604 Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press Pub. Date: 15 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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