Toward Ecosophy

Well, the Sign of the Outhouse Moon has done it again. Llewellyn Publications, who published a bunch of my books on occultism and the unexplained early on, and has been dropping those books off their backlist rather rapidly of late, informed me via form letter that Monsters: An Investigator's Guide to Magical Beings is being allowed to go out of print, effective immediately. There are still some copies in the supply chain, but they probably won't last long -- Monsters has been my most successful Llewellyn book, with very steady sales for almost twenty years now. 

The upside is that I was able to place Monsters with another publisher in less than 24 hours, and since 2021 will be the twentieth year since the original publication, we're discussing a revised and expanded edition. The second edition, published in 2011, included new sections on zombies and chimeras (monsters like the Jersey Devil and Mothman, which appear to be patched together from an assortment of creatures) and a good deal of further information on some of the old standards.

The one challenge I face now is that it's been a good long time since I've done any monster research, and I don't happen to know what the latest trends in monsterdom might be. This book is about magical entities rather than cryptids -- think ghosts, demons, and phantasms rather than sasquatches and plesiosaurs -- and there are definite trends in the world of the weird. (Zombies were hardly on anyone's radar screen in 2001, when the first edition came out.) So what's out there slithering in the shadows these days? Inquiring authors want to know...