They Bite, the follow-up to Maberry and Kramer's Stoker-winning Cryptopedia is a, well, I'm not sure... The authors' introduction calls it a guidebook, but the title's expository sections flip-flop back and forth between covering the history and folklore and churning out bibliography, filmography, etc. (And not even annotated bibliography. There are chunks of text that are just lists of author names or movie titles, with no explanation of relevance or import.) From here, the authors provide an alphabetical list of legends from around the world. This may have worked better if there was some sort of classification, even geographic, but instead we get largely redundant sections of similar creatures. (The list of vampires, for example, is almost 80 pages, twice as long as the expository section in its respective chapter, and contains around 150 species of blood- and/or soul- suckers).

The book is full of comments from notable authors, actors, and artists associated with horror (and its off-shoots), although these are so frequent that they disrupt, if not overwhelm, what little narrative there is in the title. And while it is certainly nice to get a little touch of perspective from some of your favorites in the genre, their perspectives are so similar that they add to the bogging down of the book. (This is not a criticism of the figures in question. We live in a niche genre; it's no surprise that people come to it from similar perspectives. But Maberry and Kramer could have either (a) fed better questions to elicit more diverse responses or (b) simply omitted some of these.)

From here (here being the end of chapter 1), the book largely collapses. The exposition grows shorter and shorter while the "Book of Lists" aspect takes charge. I gave up after the fourth chapter, Cryptids, which features 5 pages of discussion followed by a fifty-page creature list.

There are also serious editing problems with the book. A list of a dozen notable paranormal romance authors includes Charlaine Harris twice. The authors begin the section on werewolves with two possible explanations of the word's origin; half-a-dozen pages later, they explain the word's origin again, minus the second explanation. And while not necessarily an editing mistake, at one point they note that Maberry has seen and photographed the Yardley Yeti and then... then... how do you not include this photograph? There are eight pages of random color illustrations in the middle of the book, but you omit YOUR photograph of some mysterious creature?

Ultimately, this is a well-researched, but ultimately poorly executed title. If your looking for the name of every known (well, rumored) lake creature in the world, go for it. If you want in-depth analysis of the history of a creature's folklore, the vampire section is the only one worthwhile, and even that has been done better countless times in light of the current vampire rage. ( )