Barlowe's Guide to Fantasy

Of the guides, this one is the weaker of the two. For one, Barlowe seems to pick his subjects at random...we see monsters that had minor roles in the various books where they were portrayed (and thus, we probably didn't have a burning interest to see what they looked like if they were minor characters in the books). There's quite a few human subjects in this one as well...and they seem out of place here, as some of them are rather plain (okay, so maybe the golem did look like the Pillsbury Dough Boy...but why put him in the book?). There's also several shape shifters, which Barlowe illustrates by showing them in "mid-form", which doesn't tell us much about what they really look like. If anything, Barlowe's work competes with itself -- I was spoiled by his Science Fiction guide and this one, while definitely a beautiful addition to any collector's shelf, simply cannot match the detail of that book.