FREE: The Transitive Vampire A Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent Eager and Doomed

Karen Elizabeth Gordon is no ordinary grammarian, and her works, including The Well-Tempered Sentence and the Disheveled Dictionary (both of which I own)–are no commonplace style books. The Transitive Vampire is inhabited by a motley cast of gargoyles, werewolves, nymphs, fauns, debutantes, mastodons, and, yes, vampires, who frolic and assemble to illustrate basic principles of grammar. The sentences are fascinating, “The Styrian String Quartet is a four-headed monster of catgut and mediocrity that shouldn’t be let out of its cage.”–but the rules and their explanations are as thorough as any you might find in Strunk and White.The Transitive Vampire breathes new life into our old grammatical demons. In the words of Gordon’s introduction,
“Before I leave you in the embrace of the transitive vampire, I should introduce him to you…”
“…He had become one of night’s creatures, with a grammar he had received from the great and jagged unknown.” Gordon’s language books are not complete references on the English language; there are far more comprehensive guides than these. The real value of Gordon’s book is that it makes you actually want to read through it like a fiction novel, and the grammar lessons are absorbed along the way. Often abbreviated to the DTV, this text is a handbook for English grammar that behaves more like a literary party, inviting playful prose into to a rich, gothic aesthetic. As a hilarious exploration of grammar geared for virtually any age group, the DTV sucks the reader’s attention in like vampire drinking through a straw.Karen illustrates the basics and intricacies of English grammar beautifully—that is, with creatures of horror. Her sentences are simple and highly effective in their goals, but are also welcomingly diverting with their population of mastodons, debutantes, trolls, and the rest of Karen’s cast of black humor characters.