#monster book

[lemonmoonmochi]

When I tell you how fast I got this book from my local library it was just hmm honestly I can’t put into words but I finally found a monster romance book finally! Like damn okay I was not expecting this but thank freaking god I got this because look guy just look

This books is an slow-burn and enemies to lovers trope and I just had to it was just calling out to me and then I found out that the author of this book had more like just take all my money because I’ll buy this book if I can find it at Barnes and nobles or something!! I’m so excited to read this like I have tears in my eyes

#monster #monster lover #monster romance #vampire #vampire x human #monster book #monster romance book

[demi-shoggoth]

2023 Reading Log, pt. 15

I am behind on my writeups: the last book here I read the week of Thanksgiving!

71. The Body Fantastic by Frank Gonzalez-Crussi. This book made for a surprisingly relevant pivot from Cult of the Dead, as it starts with talking about how Christianity has made a long history from denying and denigrating the flesh. This book is a miscellany of odd medical trivia and historical beliefs about the human body, from wandering wombs to the curative power of saliva. As someone who’s read a lot of medical history books, this one didn’t stand out so much to me, but it would probably be a good starting point for someone looking to learn some of the odder highways and byways of how people have thought about bodies. The author’s sensibilities are philosophical, leaning mystical, and his personality shines through. This is particularly true in matters of food and drink—he feels disgust over eating competitions having gone hungry in his youth, for example.

72. Eight Bears by Gloria Dickie. As the name suggests, this book covers all of the extant bear species, although more from a cultural and conservation perspective than evolution or ecology. The author travels around the world in an attempt to see all of the bears in the wild, or at least in local captivity (such as going to a panda preserve in China). I think the book’s strongest chapters are the ones in South Asia, where she sees how in India, humans and sloth bears are being pressed into conflict through land use, and the waning in visibility but still strong market in bear bile in Vietnam. I was also pretty surprised about the chapter closest to home—how the black bears in Yosemite National Park were outright fed by park management for decades as a tourist attraction before the realization that, wait, getting large strong omnivores used to associating humans with food is a bad decision.

73. The Delusions of Crowds by William J. Bernstein. This is an odd one. It poses itself essentially as a sequel to Charles Mackay’s Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, a book about mass hysteria and fads from the 1840s. It narrows down Mackay’s wide scope to two major domains—economic bubbles and millenialist religion, and then progresses in a roughly chronological order. The problems are two fold. One, the narrative never really draws much linkage between these two types of “delusions of crowds”, leaving the book feeling disjointed. Second, the author assumes a lot about the reader’s background in economics (possibly because he’s an economist himself), so the explanations of the exact financial chicanery involved in the various bubbles are not always fully comprehensible. I wanted to like this book a lot more than I actually did.

74. Spirit Beings in European Folklore 2 by Benjamin Adamah. The second of four volumes, this covers primarily north-central and north-east Europe. Germany, Finland and the Netherlands get the most attention. The monsters contained within include a lot of house and field spirits, as well as many variations of alps and other sleep paralysis monsters. Again, what monsters the author decides fall into his category of “spirit beings” and which ones don’t is somewhat arbitrary. Tatzelwurms and stollenwurms, for example, are listed, even when more traditional dragons are not. I also think that the author needs to be more careful with their word choice, and/or spend more time studying folklore as a whole. For example, the book talks about the spoukhoas, a ghostly hare from the Netherlands. It talks about the spoukhoas as being a “were-hare”, despite the only lycanthrope-like trait in the entry being its vulnerability to silver… which is not universal to werewolves, and only became inexorably linked to werewolves due to Hollywood. No references to being a person at all!

75. Saurian: A Field Guide to Hell Creek by Tom Parker, Chris Mansa and RJ Palmer. This is an art book, tied into the Saurian video game in which you play as a dinosaur. As such, the book takes an in depth look at the habitat represented by the game, and discusses the flora and fauna of the late Maastrichian South Dakota. The book is, of course, gorgeous. Both in terms of the dinosaur reconstructions and the landscapes, this makes a wonderful coffee table book. This might sound like an odd complain for a coffee table book based on a video game, but I do wish it had a bibliography. The book talks a lot about specific diets and habitat preferences of the animals within, and I want to have some sort of a guide to sorting out what’s supported by evidence, and what’s creative license.

#reading log #dinosaurs #paleontology #saurian #monster book #mass hysteria #economics #anatomy #history of science #bears #wildlife conservation

[vintageseawitch]

me: i'm afraid of deep, dark woods & the deep dark oceans because WHO KNOWS WHAT COULD BE IN/DOWN IN THOSE PLACES

book types that exist: *there's SOMETHING SCARY in these DEEP & DARK WOODS* & *there's SOMETHING SCARY in the DEEPEST PARTS OF THE OCEAN*

also me: hell yeah *adds to tbr*

#book #books #booklover #creature feature #monster book #deep woods #deep ocean #mariana trench #giant monsters #smart monsters #horror books #monster horror #creature horror

[bleihnmicer]

"Books take you where you've never been before."

| x |

#dark #horror #dark art #horror art #cosmic horror #creepy #scary #cursed book #monster book #teeth #eyes #libros SEP #nightmares #art #drawing #illustration #bleihnmicer #artists on tumblr #parasites #body horror

[thecreaturecodex]

Ya-te-veo

“February 29th, Ya-Te-Veo, the Man Eating Tree” © deviantArt user Sorrow-SixThirty. Accessed at their gallery here

[The ya-te-veo is a literary hoax, appearing in the histrionic (and gloriously illustrated) Sea And Land by James W. Buel, an eight hundred page book about all of the ways that the natural world can kill you. Considering that the book has stories about prehistoric man fighting plesiosaurs, and orangutans as savage killers, it’s clear that this book is the 1880s equivalent of Men’s Adventure Magazines and should be considered just as reliable a source about biology as “Cannibal Crabs Crawl to Kill” or “Weasels Ripped My Flesh!”. And yet, some people consider its claims of “the ya-te-veo, or Man-Eating Tree” of “South America and Central Africa” to be legit. These people are stupid.]

Ya-te-veo CR 6 N Plant This shrub leaps to life, its long leaves edged with saw-like blades. It has a short trunk supported by multiple sturdy roots, on which it pulls itself along slowly.

The ya-te-veo is sometimes called the “sawtoothed shrub” or “man-eating tree”, and these are both accurate appellations. A ya-te-veo is a carnivorous plant with a taste for blood, and it gets it from large prey, including humanoids. Its razor-sharp leaves resemble those of an agave, albeit somewhat thinner and more supple, when the plant is at rest. When active, they spring into action like bladed tentacles, ripping jagged wounds in the plant’s victims. A ya-te-veo can only coordinate two of its leaves at a time to attack prey directly, but the wiggling and writhing of its several dozen appendages still can damage nearby creatures. 

Ya-te-veos can move on their roots, albeit slowly, and usually travel by night to avoid detection by potential diurnal prey. They are long lived and slow growing, acting as a more mundane carnivorous plant for the first decade or two of their lives before able to uproot themselves. Ya-te-veos are flowering plants—their flowers are white and ill-smelling, and open at night to facilitate pollination by bats. A ya-te-veo can move through magically altered vegetation with ease, and some druids treat them as pets, making sure that they are well fed and using them as lethal hazards in conjunction with spells like entangle, plant growth or wall of thorns.

Ya-te-veo            CR 6 XP 2,400 N Large plant Init +7; Senses low-light vision, Perception +8, scent Aura lashing slashes (10 ft., Ref DC 17) Defense AC 19, touch 12, flat-footed 16 (-1 size, +3 Dex, +7 natural) hp 76 (9d8+36) Fort +9, Ref +6, Will +5 DR 5/slashing; Immune plant traits Offense Speed 10 ft. Melee 2 slams +11 (1d6+4 plus bleed and grab) Space 10 ft.; Reach 10 ft. Special Attacks bleed (1d6), constrict (2d6+6), sawtooth slam Statistics Str 19, Dex 16, Con 17, Int 2, Wis 14, Cha 9 Base Atk +6; CMB +11 (+15 grapple); CMD 27 (31 vs. trip) Feats Combat Reflexes, Defensive Combat Training, Improved Initiative, Skill Focus (Survival), Weapon Focus (slam) Skills Perception +8, Stealth +5, Survival +8 (+12 tracking by scent); Racial Modifiers +4 Survival when tracking by scent SQ camouflage, improved woodland stride Ecology Environment warm forests and hills Organization solitary, pair or grove (3-6) Treasure incidental Special Abilities Aura of Lashing Slashes (Ex) All creatures within 10 feet of an active ya-te-veo must succeed a DC 17 Reflex save each round or take 1d6+2 points of slashing damage. A ya-te-veo can suppress or resume this aura as a swift action. The save DC is Dexterity based. Camouflage (Ex) Because it resembles a mundane plant when at rest, a creature must succeed a DC 20 Knowledge (nature), Perception or Survival check in order to determine that the ya-te-veo is animate. Improved Woodland Stride (Su) A ya-te-veo ignores all difficult terrain or movement penalties created by magical or mundane plant life. Sawtooth Slam (Ex) A ya-te-veo’s slam attacks deal bludgeoning and slashing damage.

#ya-te-veo #plant monster #carnivorous plant #hoaxes #pathfinder 1e #monster book #world tour

[argido]

#Draco Malfoy #draco malfoy art #draco edit #hp fanart #HP edit #hpedit #HP drawing #harry potter fanart #harry potter #monster book

[nasutaya]

Some monster book design for an assignment.

#nasuart #charcterdesign #monster book #digital art #asset design #that tongue tho

[alexkujawa]

Get glow-in-the-dark ZMORA until March 31st on my ETSY with pre-orders of newest illustrated folklore book,  31 Female Ghosts, Monsters, and Demons from Around the World! 🖤💀🌿

https://www.etsy.com/shop/AlexKujawa

#girl powered #monster book #folklore books #mythology #zmora #sleep paralysis #witch books #art books #Slavic Paganism

[ejunkiet]

looking for contemporary monster fiction recs!

helping out a friend! I’m looking for contemporary fiction recs that explore the monster genre (vampires, werewolves, etc), non-YA (and also non-smutty sadface) preferably? a preference for female authors too!

An example is Jeanette Winterson and ‘FranKissStein’...

@austennerdita2533 maybe you can help? (I love your book rec posts!)

basically, if you have a modern fantasy book rec that deals with supernatural creatures and the question of monster vs. identity, please send them my way? <3

#fiction #writeblr #readblr #fantasy #monster book #terato

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

A friend of mine wrote a book this year. They wanted to publish it in time for Halloween, but real life got in the way so they had to delay it until this month.

It's a contemporary fantasy horror novel about monsters within and without.

Monsters Are We by Ren Montgomery

The Monster comes when it is called.

Penelope and Leo Draven are as different as they are dangerous. They are wild things, harboring secrets not just from the outside world but from each other. Only their seventeen-year-old daughter Clementine seems tame.

Despite their self-destructive tendencies, the Dravens have managed to keep up the appearance of a perfect life together.

Until the Monster is called.

It has been seen many times in many places, but few have lived to tell the tale and fewer still have been believed. Nowadays though, everyone carries a cellphone on them at all times. There is no privacy anymore, so for the first time, the rampaging beast has been caught on film.

In our mundane world, this irrefutable proof of magic changes everything. This is no hoax. The Dravens' lives are about to be laid bare.

Monsters are real.

The dead tell no tales.

And neither do the Dravens.

It's available for pre-order on kindle right now and the paperback will be ready within the week, publishing on November 11th.

If you're a fan of monster movies, check it out. I beta read it for them this summer, and it perfectly encapsulated everything I love about the genre without getting bogged down with references and cliches.

I offered to show it off to my followers because I thought it would be up some of your guys' alleys. I'm not gonna blaze this post because I know my personal orbit of weirdos will appreciate it more than a generic wider audience I have no control over.

#novel #nano #nanowrimo #monsters #monsters are we #preorder #monster book #monster novel #spooky month 2 electric boogaloo

[demi-shoggoth]

2023 Reading Log, pt 13

I've been putting off writing this one for a while, because all of these books are... fine? I didn't feel very strongly about them any way, either positively or negatively. Plus, I've been strongly burnt out on writing in general, and it's been hard for me to push myself to even write little 100 word blurbs about books.

61. Strange Japanese Yokai by Kenji Murakami, translated by Zack Davisson. It’s rare that I get the opportunity to read a yokai book originally written in Japanese, seeing as I don’t speak the language, so I jumped on the chance to get a copy of this when I found out it existed. It’s cute, with cartoony artwork and little data file sidebars that remind me of a Scholastic book… except the content is far weirder than what American kids books contain. The theme of the yokai stories here is that a lot of yokai… kind of suck. The stories told about the big hitters, like oni, kappa, kitsune and tanuki, are about them being foolish or having easily exploited weaknesses, and a lot of the other stories are about gross or pathetic yokai more than scary or impressive ones. The book is overall charming, but a very quick read. More of a supplement to other yokai books than a one-stop shop.

62. Mythical Creatures of Maine by Christopher Packard. This is a bit of an odd duck, seeing as it combines multiple monster traditions (fearsome critters, cryptids and Native American lore) under the same set of covers. It’s a pretty typical A-Z monster book, with some good information about obscure fearsome critters and Wabanaki monsters. There are, however, two things about the book I actively dislike, that keep me from strongly recommending it. The art is terrible. The illustrations by Dan Kirchoff are done in a style I can only describe as “fake woodcuts with flat colors” and are ugly (and in some cases, difficult to decipher). The other is that most, but not all of the monsters, get little microfiction epigrams in the character of Burton Marlborough Packard, the author’s great-great grandfather who worked in the Maine lumberwoods. It’s a weird touch, especially since the epigrams are only a sentence or two, and are typically pretty pointless.

63. Mushrooms: A Natural and Cultural History by Nicholas P. Money. There have been a number of books about fungi for the educated lay audience that have been published in the last couple of years. This one doesn’t really stand out from the crowd. The photography is nice, and there’s some coverage of the history of mycology and some of the prominent people in the field. But the book isn’t very well organized, bouncing from one topic to another within the same paragraph, and there are a number of passages that feel more like rants (the chapter on culinary uses for mushrooms, for example).

64. The Lives of Beetles by Arthur V. Evans. This book serves as an introduction to entomology in general, and beetles in particular. It covers core topics like insect body plans, introduces cladistics and covers the evolution, ecology, behavior and conservation of beetles in broad strokes. These strokes feel particularly broad because there are a lot of beetles; much of the book covers groups on the levels of family, which makes it feel a little bit shallow. These are alternated with descriptions of individual species, and this is where the book shines, as it gives good information about both well known species and some pretty obscure ones. The real value of the book, to someone who has been around the entomological block as I have, is in its production values—this book is quite simply gorgeous, and there are lots of nice photos of many different species.

65. Hoax: A History of Deception by Ian Tattersall and Peter Névraumont. This book has an identity crisis. You would think, with a title like that, that the main topic would be about hoaxes and cons. Some of it is. Some of it is about people who believed what they were pushing, even if it wasn’t true (apocalypse prophecies, homeopathy). Some of it is about misconceptions in archaeology, even if nobody was intentionally lying (the Piltdown Man is an actual hoax. Mary Leakey misidentifying rocks as human artifacts isn’t). And the organization is frankly baffling—it’s arranged in chronological order for some part of a topic, regardless of how much of the chapter is actually about when it’s set. For example, a chapter on fixed games is set at 260 BCE, but spends more of its length talking about modern pro wrestling than gladiator matches. The book is a somewhat bizarre reading experience.

#reading log #hoaxes #mushrooms #mycology #monster book #yokai #fearsome critters #entomology #beetles

[cosmicluci]

I wanted to make a Junji Ito-esque monster design. So I drew this monster book. It really...grabs the reader. You just can't put it down.

#cosmicluci #traditional art #monster art #monster #creature design #book #bookdrawing #monster book #junji ito style

[adorablecrab]

Reading a book on sea monsters on ancient maps and I thought this was such a funny way to put it. They couldn’t even afford sea monsters :///

#blabla #the book is sea monsters on medieval and renaissance maps by chet van duzer

[tiastarastrals]

Demons Castles demon species cuz why not

#book #bookblr #original species #open species #demons castle #demon book #devil #my demon #demon species #entity #monster book #monster #monster species #own species

[c-herondale]

Obsessed with how Annabeth isn't spacial, she isn't a chosen one, she has no demigod magic powers, she is for all intents and purposes, a fairly normal girl.

But she poured her blood, sweat and tears into becoming the best warrior she could be. She trained hard for years because she knew she had disadvantages and she didn't want to be seen as weak.

She's literally known in Camp and by monsters like Alecto as the most powerful demigod alive and she doesn't have powers. It's almost as of girls don't need to be magical to be a hero!

#annabeth chase is That Bitch #annabeth chase #percy jackson #percy jackon and the olympians #percabeth #athena cabin #pjo #pjo series #pjo spoilers #pjo tv show #pjo books #annabeth #percy and annabeth #annabeth pjo #annabeth percy jackson #leah is our annabeth #lightning thief #sea of monsters #titans curse #battle of the labyrinth #last olympian #heroes of olympus #lost hero #son of neptune #mark of athena #house of hades #luke castellan #grover underwood #daughter of athena #percy jackson series

[counting-stars-gayly]

MEDUSA WASN’T A MONSTER BECAUSE SHE HAD SNAKES FOR HAIR BUT BECAUSE SHE HURT PEOPLE WHO DIDN’T DESERVE IT LET’S FUCKING GOOOOOOOO

#not everyone who looks like a hero is a hero and not everyone who looks like a monster is a monster!!!!! #they’re not just sticking to the core theme of the books; they’re ENHANCING the message!!! #percy jackson and the olympians #pjo #percy jackson disney+ #disney percy jackson #disney pjo #rick riordan #medusa #percy jackson #percy jackon and the olympians