The Deluxe Transitive Vampire (Karen Elizabeth Gordon)

As much as I enjoy language and grammar, I don’t very often read grammar books for fun. Most grammar books are informative and interesting in their own way, but they will not keep you turning the pages late into the night.

Enter Karen Elizabeth Gordon and The Deluxe Transitive Vampire. This is a grammar book that is actually a joy to read, plus it has pictures of gargoyles, bats, and other fun things. (Some of the illustrations are nudes, so if you’re offended by that sort of thing, you may want to choose a more conventional grammar book. But you will miss so much!) This is the grammar book I would write if I decided to write a grammar book. Fortunately for me, the book already exists and I can just sit back and enjoy it.

I suppose I enjoyed the sentences I learned to diagram and parse back in middle school. If I hadn’t I probably would have gone into molecular biology rather than editing. But we never had a sentence quite as interesting as

The bat suspended from Loona’s hairdo was repulsed by her Nuit Blanche perfume.

Or how about

The rat shot the pizza chef dead.

That second sentence always makes me smile. I think it has something to do with the illustration of the rat holding a revolver, presumably aimed at the unfortunate pizza chef, who I guess made a really bad pie. Not enough cheese, perhaps. Or maybe too many mushrooms.

Back to reality (drat!). If you feel your grammar is a little rusty and the thought of actually reading a grammar book makes you yawn, you may want to try The Deluxe Transitive Vampire. You will learn some things and be pleasantly entertained. You will learn that

The mannequin gave the baby vampire her phone number, but she knew he’d never call.

(Actually, in this example you’re learning two things: how to join independent clauses, and, more importantly to some of you, baby vampires are unreliable.)