The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: A Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed Hardback - 1993

Playful and practical, this is the style book you can’t wait to use, a guide that addresses classic questions of English usage with wit and the blackest of humor. Black-and-white illustrations throughout.

Here now is an enlarged version of the only handbook of grammar you will ever want to read. With this special edition, Karen Gordon gives the reader more illustrations and even more examples of confusing appositives, the many uses of gerunds, the complicated matter of agreements. The Deluxe Transitive Vampire spins a lively gothic narrative with such characters as the Debutante, famous courtesan, wolf, bat, vampire, mastodon, pizza chef, lummox, lamia, and trilingual solitary. Gordon conjures up this eccentric cast with a uniquely wicked, witty and playful style. Yet every rule is explained with great clarity and precision. While entertaining the reader with the unexpected, she makes the most intricate and impossible usages clear for the first time. "You will not find a more charming or constructive companion than Karen Gordon", Kenneth Auchincloss reported in Newsweek when Ms. Gordon's punctuation book, The Well-Tempered Sentence, first appeared. "How rare it is to laugh as one studies a grammar text", Doris Grumbach exclaimed on National Public Radio. And in the New York Times, Herbert Mitgang warned, "(Karen Gordon's) sentences might make the Edwardian Brothers Fowler blush and, perhaps, Professor Strunk and Mr. White wince". For any reader who finds the rules of grammar irregular and confusing, this book should guide him with confidence through the maze of linguistics.