Q: Your earlier titles feature mostly male protagonists, and your more recent titles (especially the four-book series Dragon Assassin) tend more toward female protagonists. Obviously, judging by my output, most of my ideas are either scary or fantastical. I guess the best way to put it is that I’m most drawn to whatever my idea is and the best way to tell it. When I get an idea, there’s a process I go through deciding the best way to tell the story and then I pursue that no matter what the genre.

So when I became an author, it was equally natural to write about the very things I’d been reading about. At first, as a young reader, I would just soak up everything I could, naturally gravitating toward reading history, science fiction, fantasy and horror. What are you most drawn to and why?Ī: In many ways I’m like a sponge. But you’ve also written nonfiction (including a biography of former Canadian prime minister John Diefenbaker and the titles Monsterology and Villainology), as well as a historic novel, Megiddo's Shadow. Q: Some might peg you as a thriller, fantasy or steampunk writer. He is the author of twenty-nine novels for young readers including The Hunchback Assignments, which won the prestigious TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award and Dust, winner of the Governor General’s Award for Children’s Literature. Lively black-and-white illustrations by Derek Mah make this a book that is sure to be a hit with every monster-loving reader.Arthur Slade was raised on a ranch in the Cypress Hills of Saskatchewan. Slade's hilarious text presents delicious imagined gossip, favorite blood types, favorite movies, and even favorite haunts (you should pardon the expression) with character descriptions and thoroughly researched background information. He provides facts, real history, imagined history, and lots of jokes to make these creatures come to life.

Governor General's Award-winner Arthur Slade has gathered together fifteen scary critters, ranging from Dracula to Golem, from Frankenstein to Baba Yaga and even a zombie. Monsterology: Fabulous Lives of the Creepy, the Revolting, and the Undead is the most fun anyone can have with some of the nastiest creatures ever imagined! Who can resist morsels like the fact that ?Drakul? means ?son of the dragon? in Romanian, that the first Golem may have been Enkidu, who appeared in the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, and that Frankenstein's Monster was first inspired by Mary Shelley's nightmare?

Monsterology by Arthur Slade