Profiles twenty-five monsters from mythology, folklore, and literature, from Medusa the gorgon and Polyphemus the cyclops to Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, and the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow.

Unhappy after his parents move to a weird subdivision and become workaholics, thirteen-year-old Travis returns to his old Salinas neighborhood and becomes actively involved in saving the John Steinbeck Library and, at the same time, begins seeing characters from Steinbeck's books who seem to have a message for him.

"Library page Baru Reddy loves horror stories so when the T. Middleton Nightengale City Library transforms into a ruined gothic cathedral complete with authors Mary Shelley, Ann Radcliffe, and Charlotte Brontë, not to mention a host of zombie monks, he is not as alarmed as his fellow pages; he just needs to figure out a way to bring Mary Shelley's creation (made out of books, not body parts) to life to defeat the zombies--and who better to help than...