Night Creatures (Enchanted World)

Rating:
Summary: Great way of knowing what people used to think of the night.
Review: Excellent book, with beautiful pictures representing the stories. This book describes everyones hidden fears of what goes bump in the night all the way back to the beginning of recorded history.

Rating:
Summary: Beautifully illustrated mythology
Review: This book is one in Time Life Books' The Enchanted World series. Each of these books covers a different aspect of folklore and mythology, and they are an excellent set. They tell stories in a similar format and complement each other well without repeating the content. Each is about 140 pages.

This is a beautifully illustrated well printed volume. Artists include Matt Mahurin, John Collier, John Jude Palencar, Marshall Arisman, John Howe, Kunio Hagio, Michael Paraskevas, Brian McCall, Gary Kelly, Willi Glasauer, Yvonne Gilbert and Sam Bayer. Older depictions of night creatures are mixed in, including Henry Fuseli's Nightmare.

Stories are retold in a style that makes for a good read. These stories come from all over the world. Often there will be smaller illustrations and captions in the margins to the main story. These tell variations of the story and related stories from other cultures.

This is a beautifully bound and printed book. The binding is just cloth to collectors, but it is printed to look like a wizard's book. The cover shows a dragon holding a picture of a spooky night creature (I think its a vampire). I think it was the cover that got me reading this when I was child (this would be for older children because of the spooky nature).

Chapters include:
Perilous Paths through the Dark: A reckoning with Fianna's ancient bane
Visitations from the Realm of the Shadow: Charting the kingdom of dreams
Blood Feasts of the Da__ed: Nightstalker of Croglin Grange
The Way of the Werebeast: The fox maiden

This is a well researched nicely produced series. For me one book in the series (I think it was Fairies) had me hooked. If you are interested in mythology and all things magic then it is definitely worth trying out the series. High school and middle school libraries should consider the series. Some books might cause issues since they are about the occult, but some like The Legend of Camelot book will be completely Kosher.