The Werewolf Book encyclopedia of shapeshifting beings

I had not forgotten about the review of this book, however time goes by so extremely fast and stuff always pop up in between me scheduled blog entries. This is a follow up review of the Vampire book encyclopedia of the undead.

And if you checked my review of the Vampire book this book on werewolves is pretty much the same although I think it was written after the Vampire book and by a different group of people. The book has a longer timeline at the very beginning and continues the encyclopedia approach of listing various movies, people, folklore stories and various historical recounts of stuff related to werewolves or shape shifters.

The key word for this book of in the "shapeshifting" as the main focus is on werewolves but you get a lot of odd stuff in there as well (imo sometimes a bit too much) filler material on stuff like Serpent people to name but one. The book is only half as thick as the Vampire book but seems to struggle to fill those pages with entries on the subject, they even include vampires at one point, other times they focus on serial killers that really have nothing to do with the subject.

While the Vampire book was indeed about "Undead" it did feel a bit more relevant with the monsters and creatures beside the vampires being described. I don't know why this is, as I would imagine there are tons of stories, anecdote and folklore subjects to make just a thick a book on Werewolves and cram as much werewolf related entries as they could with the vampires. Apparently there isn't.
Not to say that the content is bad or boring, but if you expect the same excellent and numerous amount of entries as in the Vampire book you can be left a bit disappointed and underwhelmed.
Most of the entries are also written vaguely or being short.

I simply cannot recommend this book as strongly as the Vampire book. While this book might still be of interest for fans of Werewolves, (and it is still fairly cheap at 15USD over at Amazon), the casual reader might find it to be too vague and all over the place to really get a good insight and knowledge about werewolves.

I would rate this book as 2.5 if you are a casual reader and 3 if you are a big fan of Werewolves.

The Vampire book imo is a solid 4.5.