Melton's Cover Revealed!

It's the best I can muster up for the time being, folks, but we finally get to see what the cover for J. Gordon Melton's The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead, 3rd ed., is gonna look like:

Kinda looks like a demonic Na'vi, doesn't it?

I should also point out that if you do "Click to LOOK INSIDE!", you're only gonna see content from the second edition. As of this writing, anyway.

If you wanna see what the covers for the previous editions looked like, click here.

Encyclopaedia Scoop!

I've heard rumblings about this one for a while now, so it gives me great pleasure to confirm that there's gonna be a third edition of J. Gordon Melton's The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead.

According to its Amazon listing, it's due for release on September 1, and it'll set you back a mere US $29.95 (not including postage).

The first edition was released in 1994, and even though its was preceded by Matthew Bunson's The Vampire Encyclopedia (1993), it's set the benchmark for subsequent vampire encyclopaedias.

Its popularity also saw several other similar works enter the market, and Melton, himself, followed it up with a second edition in 1999.

It capitalised on contemporary interest in Buffy and Blade and also greatly expanded entries on White Wolf's role-playing game, Vampire: The Masquerade. It even incorporated a listing of websites (811-813), probably one of the first vampire books to do so.

No doubt the third edition will cover the Twilight craze and shine a light on the vampire's integration into mainstream pop culture in the 11 years since the previous work was published.

Critiquing Cheung

My eBay-ordered copy of Theresa Cheung's The Element Encyclopedia of Vampires (London: HarperElement, 2009) arrived in the post today. I featured it on my Amazon wishlist some time ago.

From cursory glances, let's say J. Gordon Melton can rest easy.

Take her Arnold Paole entry (445-448). She claims he was stationed in Greece when he was (allegedly) attacked by a vampire (446). Bzzzt. Wrong. He was actually stationed in Ottoman-occupied ("Turkish") Serbia.

She also uses a faulty source for her Peter Plogojowitz entry (454-456), the giveaway being that she states his death as being in September 1725 (455). Which is kinda strange, considering the Plogojowitz case was dealt with in the July 21, 1725 issue of the Wienerisches Diarium. Whoops!

A source on Polish vampirism is also misspelled, that is Everio Athiesm (462, 671), which is actually Eversio Atheismi seu pro Deo contra Atheos libri duo by Georgio Gengell (who she doesn't name).

I'm also disturbed by the fact that she includes an entry on Dr. Hugh Pecos (449). She says, "Although Pecos's knowledge of vampire lore, and the science of real vampires, is extensive he remains a controversial figure, and the FVZA has frequently been dismissed by historians and researchers as a fictional organization."

Well, Theresa, that's because it is a fictional organization.

Let's keep in mind that the Federal Vampire & Zombie Agency (FVZA) claims to have been founded by Ulysses S. Grant, as a governmental department for the eradication of vampires and zombies in the US. If this wasn't enough to make one suspicious of their claims, there's always the "Disclaimer" on their homepage:

This site is is fictional and is for entertainment purposes only. We are not affiliated with the U.S. Government in any way. Under no cirumstances are you to harm anyone based on information from this site.

If that doesn't solve that little "mystery", I dunno what will.

So, to sum up, don't buy this book expecting a scholarly guide to vampires. Quite a shame, in light of its extensive list of entries, a pretty good bibliography (659-662) and a sizable index (665-685).

Let's hope Theresa Bane's Encyclopedia of Vampire Mythology (2010) proves to be a lot more fruitful.

Lastly, you can read Niels' review of Cheung's book here. His criticisms are a lot more thorough.

Another Vampire Encyclopaedia on the Way!

Theresa Bane's Encyclopedia of Vampire Mythology, which I last covered here, is still a while away from general release (originally slated for June, but looks like it'll be out in March).

In the meantime, I've just come across references to another addition to the vampire encyclopaedia genre.

But it's not by her.

I stumbled across this newbie while I was looking up info relating to Ronald Foust's "Rite of Passage: The Vampire Tale as Cosmogonic Myth" (1986). This lead me to Matt Cardin's blog entry, "What I Read in 2009".

I was scanning the entry for other vampire stuff, when I came across this little tidbit in his biographic entry on the sidebar:

He is also a successful freelance blogger, consultant, and copywriter, and will contribute several entries, including an examination of vampires and religion, to the forthcoming reference work "Encyclopedia of the Vampire: The Living Dead in Myth, Legend, and Popular Culture," edited by S.T. Joshi.

I hurriedly went a-Googlin' for the book.

The first page in the search was Stephen Jones' upcoming works, which reveals his contribution to it is an entry called "Vampires in Television". The publication date given is 2010 and he (courteously) lists the publisher: "ABC-CLIO, USA".

I checked out their website, which strangely has no listing for the book.

It's not even listed in Amazon.

But, I've also found that a bloke named Bev Vincent will also be contributing to the book (he's got four entries) and that Matt Cardin's webpage contradicts Jones' reference to the publisher. He lists it as Greenwood Press.

Yet, Greenwood Press' website has no listing for the book, either. Very odd.

Time to check out Joshi, himself.

In doing so, I found another contributor, Lisa Kroger, and also...Joshi's blog.

Here's what he has to say about the book in his news section, 12 December 2009:

I am currently working on a number of projects. Nearly complete is The Encyclopedia of the Vampire, a one-volume project commissioned by Greenwood Press (www.greenwood.com). It will contain entries, ranging from 250 words to 3000 words, on all aspects of vampirism in literature, history, media, and culture, with important contributions by Paula Guran, Elizabeth Miller, James Holte, Joyce Jesionowski, Tony Fonseca, and many others. The book is a little late, but I am still hopeful that it can appear in late 2010.

As you might be able to tell, I'm quite excited about this upcoming work.

Joshi is a well-respected literary critic of fantasy literature (mainly focusing on H. P. Lovecraft), so this is almost-certainly gonna be a brilliant project.

Can't wait!

Bane's Encyclopedia Cover Revealed!

Sometime ago, I wrote about Theresa Bane's upcoming vampire encyclopedia.

She's posted an update about it on her blog, along with its cover, which, I gotta say, looks pretty spiffy.

It's called Encyclopedia of Vampire Mythology, but we'll have to wait a while for it. According to Bane, it's due for release in "June in 2010 as a 7×10 hardback and as an e-book download."

You can pre-order it now, if you like. That is, if you happen to have a spare US$75 lying around.