Now that the entire Jane Austen catalog has been rewritten to incorporate supernatural elements, it's time nonfiction gets the treatment. Personally, I'd like to see Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics written from the perspective of eating your brain. Oh, wait -- it already is.
Well, then, how about The Elements of Style done noir? Enter: Karen Gordon's The Transitive Vampire. Not technically a rewrite of Strunk & White but operating in the same vein (zing!), TTV is a collection of grammar and style advice intended to help you improve your writing. The treatment starts off basic, beginning with a review of the parts of speech, then working through prepositional phrases and clauses, moving on to parallel structure, verb agreement, and so on, and concluding with a chapter of weakly-constructed sentences and suggested improvements. The "vampire" part is the examples, which range from the sublime to the truly bizarre. How can you not like a grammar book that includes examples like The debutante in the Dior dress was nuzzling the gargoyle (illustrating proper phrase placement) or The hand that is languishing on the windowsill once was mine (use of the nonrestrictive adjective clause) or In her rickety garret, which was crawling with rats, she lay dreaming of biceps and divorce (proper sentence structure)?
I can't say what a transitive vampire is, compared to the other kinds, but if it helps you remember the difference between a coordinate conjunction and a conjunctive adverb then I say it has earned its keep. Worth the price of admission if only for the woodcuts and other indescribable old timey illustrations.
Make clicking HERE to see it on Amazon
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