THE MAGNIFICENT BOOK OF DRAGONS

A select gallery of dragons and related creatures of myth and legend from every continent except Antarctica.

Kenny goes for grandeur in his 36 full-body portraits, loading his digital brushes with shimmering, saturated colors and posing his writhing subjects flying, swimming, or coiled threateningly over hills or heaps of treasure. Though some, like Fafnir, Quetzalcoatl, and Typhon, will likely be familiar to many younger dragon lovers, there is an unusual number of less-renowned monsters: the Mekong River’s Phaya Naga, for instance, as well as the eyeball-loving Boitatá of Brazil, the Mississippi’s Piasa Bird with its creepily human face, and the Swat River Valley’s Apalala—said to be benign and so an outlier in this otherwise ill-tempered gathering. Caldwell’s accompanying notes are rather less magnificent. Along with leaving her sources of information unmentioned, she offers only terse assortments of descriptive observations, perfunctory mentions of prominent legends, and individual fact boxes that don’t always capture the thrill: Nidhogg, for example, the serpent gnawing at the roots of Yggdrasil, has “teeth that can chew through trees.” (Well, so do beavers.) There is no backmatter beyond an unlabeled world map strewn with tiny images that underscore the geographic diversity of this scaly assemblage. Despite this diversity, the aesthetic of the art throughout will be familiar to lovers of European-based fantasy regardless of any given beast’s culture of origin. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Worth a gander for the art, at least.