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No
doubt it sounded like a good idea. Take the monsters that
appear in Buffy
and explore their origins - both cultural and otherwise, and
examine how the show takes these "rules" and builds
it's own mythology.
Sadly,
with The Monster Book, Pocket Books have missed an opportunity,
and what we're left with is a bit of an pricey disappointment.
The
introduction contains the book's first cop-out. Just because
the Bezoar from Bad Eggs didn't fall into one of the
authors' categories, they took the easy way out out and just
omitted them from the book!
The
intro aside, the book follows a set pattern. Each of the
nine sections looks at the mythology and influences before moving
onto the monsters we saw on the show itself. For some
reason, these are analysed in a Top Trumps style way,
with a rather strange definition of "unique" - apparently,
Oz's "unique attributes" include the fact that he
is a werewolf. True, but hardly unique since we've seen
other werewolves on the show and Veruca is, in fact, included
in the book as well!
The
element of the book repeats one of the few failings of The
Watcher's Guide - the tendency to overuse quotes
from the show. This is taken to annoying extremes when
we've told something only for it to be repeated a page later
in the form of the actual lines used on the show.
Following
the look at the monsters seen on the show, we get a look at
the how the category of monsters has been used in folklore and
popular culture. At its best, this section is interesting,
but it can also verge on the tedious.
The
authors have a tendency to throw too much information at the
reader, and a some of it is pretty irrelevant. So, for
example, the section on vampires includes a brief mention of
Peter Kurten, the so-called Dusseldorf Vampire, a psychotic
who actually used scissors and hammers to murder his victims,
rather than biting them. In fact, the sheer number of
books, plays, films and comics included is also rather overwhelming
without any form of index, and it can be frustrating trying
to look up a particular reference within these sections.
To
be honest, this element of the book struck me as research the
authors had done for other projects that was reused for The
Monster Book with minimal retooling. While Joss Whedon's
appetite for comic books is well known, it can be rather boring
reading exactly which issues of long-defunct comic books particular
characters appeared in, especially when the relevance to Buffy
is often tenuous in the extreme.
There
are also some annoying typos and inaccuracies dotted throughout
the book, including the bizarre assertion that The Strange
Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was written during the Jack
the Ripper murders of 1888 when the correct publication date
of 1886 was given in the preceding paragraph!
Five
years or so ago, the BBC TV series Nightmare followed
the creation of the likes of Dracula, and how Stoker
built up his own vampire mythology. The Monster Book
could have been a Buffy equivalent, concentrating more
on how the show has based its mythology on what's gone before
it and less on merely listing the number of times vampires,
werewolves, witches et al have appeared in various media.
BACK
TO THE TOP
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THE
MONSTER BOOK
Written
by CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN,
STEPHEN R. BISSETTE
and THOMAS E. SNIEGOSKI
POCKET BOOKS
£10.99
RATING
5/10
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