Most Popular Books by Hal Johnson

For readers who have always wanted to enroll in a school for magic--be it Hogwarts with Harry Potter or Camp Halfblood with Percy Jackson! Wizard lovers will delight in pretending they’re learning magic from a cheat-sheet handbook from an elite school for sorcery. Welcome to the Apprentice Academy. Congratulations on your acceptance to one of the world’s finest institutions for sorcery. Your course of study here will be long and perilous, but this book of sorcery skills and fascinating tales from the world of magic will help you along the way—ideally with all your limbs and wits intact. Learn how to: · Read minds! · Prophesize! · Perform a love spell! · Choose an animal familiar! · Turn anything into gold! · Summon demons! · Find a lair! · And more! But most of all learn to cheat, or, rather, to weasel through without actually cheating. Please follow all instructions carefully, as one wrong move can transform your hands into forks or serpents, and then you will have a hard time turning the page. Inspired by folklore and mythology around the world, Apprentice Academy: Sorcerers is a rich, multicultural exploration and celebration of magic from not just Europe, but also from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas. Narrated by a witty and weaseling character who supplies cheat sheets to students, Apprentice Academy opens the door on an exciting new world of magic and myth, chivalry and royalty, with the second book in the series–Knights–scheduled for Spring 2024.

Meet the snoligoster, who feeds on the shadows of its victims. The whirling whimpus, who once laid low an entire Boy Scout troop. And the hoop snake, who can chase prey at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour and then, with one sting of its venomous tail, cause it to turn purple, swell up, and—alas—die. These and 17 other fearsome creatures are among the most fantastical beasts in American folklore. Their stories, as narrated by one of the last surviving cryptozoologists, are best enjoyed while sitting around a campfire. If you dare.

Meet the monsters in this who’s who of the baddest of the bad! Like those supernatural beasts everyone knows and fears—the bloodsucking vampire, Count Dracula, and that eight-foot-tall mash-up of corpses, Frankenstein’s Monster. Or that scariest of mummies, Cheops, who scientists revived after 4,700 years—big mistake! Or more horrifying yet, the Horla, an invisible, havoc-wreaking creature that herds humans like cattle and feeds of their souls. Drawn from the pages of classic books and tales as old as time, this frightfully exciting collection features 25 of the creepiest creatures ever imagined, from witches and werewolves to dragons and ghosts. Every monster is brought to life in a full-size full-color portrait that captures the essence of the beast, and in lively text that recounts the monster’s spine-tingling story. With sidebars that explore the history and the genre of each sourcebook, The Big Book of Monsters is an exciting introduction to literature and language arts.

A wildly entertaining novel about a young man who discovers that he is part of a secret society of immortal were-creatures bent on hunting one another into extinction. Illustrations.

Congratulations on your acceptance to the Apprentice Academy, one of the world’s finest institutions for knightly education. Your course of study here will prepare you for a career as a knight, samurai, Viking, or really any type of sword-swinging warrior. Swinging a sword is inherently dangerous, but this guide will help you complete your education while minimizing the twin risks of 1. getting maimed and 2. working too hard. Learn how to: • Fight people! • Fight dragons! • Fight monsters! • Fight everything else! • Die honorably! • And more! Please follow all instructions carefully. If you go off on your own and try something silly, and then get your head chopped off or your body bitten in two, don’t start drafting a letter of complaint. You had fair warning.

Across 1400 years and six continents (sorry, Australia), Impossible Histories examines pivotal moments in history from both sides—what happened and what would have happened had things gone differently. The results are by turns strange, hilarious, tragic...and always fascinating. Imagine a world in which... - Hitler builds a thousand-year Reich - Columbus gets driven from the Americas by mounted knights - Robespierre decapitates Caesar Augustus - The Inca Empire has an air force - Jimmy Carter presses the Button These brave new worlds are merely our own, familiar world—if something small had happened differently. We''re all one elephant away from peace in the Middle East, one knife thrust away from nuclear Armageddon. This book examines twenty pivotal moments in history, asks what if?...,and drags the answers kicking and screaming into the light. History--factual and counterfactual has never been so entertaining. A whirlwind ride through history as it never happened--but could have.

Nerdy, prudish Oscar Cox has bragged to one too many people about his fantasy life as international playboy and all around man of mystery-and now his T.A. union wants to hire him to assassinate some sap of an undergrad. If that''s not bad enough, perhaps the T.A. union is operating under the command of sinister shadowy forces from three thousand years ago. How are you going to math your way out of this one, Oscar? A Pynchonian comedy, a paranoid thriller, a northeastern Confederacy of Dunces-this book is also both a collection of penis jokes the only accurate surviving record of what life was like in New York City in 2003.