Thirty-One Days O’Horror: Crestwood House Monster Series (1977-1987)

Those wonderful orange and black books!

If you grew up in the late 1970’s or 1980’s and had even the slightest interest in monsters or horror, you probably came across at least one or two of the Crestwood House Monster books. For a kid like myself, these orange and black covered books were the stuff of dreams and nightmares. My school’s library had many of these books on the shelf, and I was sure to read all of them.

These books introduced me to many of the classic monsters that I grew to love over the years. Their focus was primarily on the legendary Universal Monsters, but they also covered a few other monsters such as Godzilla and the Blob.

I have vivid memories of reading these books as a child. The cover of the Wolf Man book has been imprinted in my brain ever since I first saw it. It’s a photo of Henry Hull as the werewolf in Werewolf of London (1935) and not the better known Lon Chaney, Jr. from The Wolf Man (1941), but the picture impacted me due to the “realness” of it all. You can see the creases in Hull’s mouth and his eyes are extremely harsh. It’s a brilliant image.

The series was released between 1977 and 1987. From the research that I’ve done, there were apparently fifteen books released during that time frame. Written by Ian Thorne (a pseudonym for science fiction writer Julian May), the first twelve books in the series gave a surprisingly in depth look at the cinematic history of each of the monsters covered. The final three books were written by William R. Sanford and Carl R. Green and did an excellent job of presenting some pretty amazing information about the monsters and their histories in film as well.

The books were also full of brilliant photographs. They included shots lifted directly from the films, promotional stills, behind-the-scenes photographs, and even “making of” shots including the above posed photo of of Milicent Patrick, who designed the Gill-Man. Patrick’s contributions to The Creature From The Black Lagoon weren’t fully recognized until after her passing. I actually reviewed a book on the subject by Mallory O’Meara entitled The Lady From The Black Lagoon and you can check that out here. You can order your own copy here as well. I highly recommend it!

Did you read any of these books while growing up? Were they your first introduction to any classic monsters? Let me know in the comments. Also, if you are interested, I found a PDF version of the Godzilla book available at archive.org. Click here to read the book absolutely free!

Thanks for reading my post. I hope that you enjoyed this trip down memory lane. I hope to one day find a copy of one of these books and purchase it for myself. There are some available on the web for purchase, but most of them are out of my price range. Until then, I’ll have to settle on reading web versions of the books that I find.