STRANGE AND TERRIBLE THINGS

A lurid, leering gallery of bone-crushing, blood-sucking flesh rippers from many lands, times, and cultures.

A skinless Boo Hag and many other truly terrifying creepy creatures, depicted in garishly lit detail, lunge and grimace directly at viewers in this unusually wide-ranging set of supernatural horrors. Organizing his entries into eight alliterative general categories—beginning with nine “Heinous Hags” and ending with assorted “Dark Divinities”—Forst pairs each full-page, and occasionally full-spread, portrait with an equally chilling description or scenario: “Her fangs and long, claw-like nails are the last things you see before the Pontianak sucks the eyes out of your head, digs her sharp nails into your stomach, and begins to feast on your blood.” Though his subjects are drawn from traditional folklore or urban legendry, he frequently brings them up to date with helpful side notes on comics or video games in which they figure and also tucks lists of recommended creature features and other modern media in at the end. For all the familiar boojums haunting these pages, from the closet-dwelling Boogeyman to a blood-spattered La Llorona (dragons are, oddly, absent), it’s the large array of lesser-known threats that give this a leg up over many similar scare catalogs. “A lot of them have pretty sharp teeth,” the author warns with fantastic understatement.

Art and narrative combine with unusually broad scope to guarantee many a sleepless night.