From the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research:
The Brian McConnell Book Award Committee is pleased to announce that this year’s winner is David J. Puglia’s edited volume North American Monsters: A Contemporary Legend Casebook. Featuring 19 essays by a wide variety of contemporary legend scholars, Puglia’s edited volume is exceptionally presented to encourage exploration and scholarship of the topic. While Puglia provides short introductions to each essay that provide biographical detail, point to distinctive issues raised in the essay, and provide important context, one reviewer notes, “Puglia breaks new ground by adding short bibliographies at the end of each essay, leading readers to other essays on the same general topic, many published after the anthologized article and so not to be found in the original notes.” The award committee also commends Puglia’s well-crafted introduction. A reviewer notes, “Puglia’s introduction is itself a major work that concedes the growing popularity of ‘monster studies’ in popular culture research and makes a strong case for viewing the genre of explicitly fictional monsters like Dracula and Frankenstein against the much broader range of indigenous monsters celebrated in oral culture.”
