Harry Potter fans will revel in Jody Revenson's Harry Potter: The Creature Vault (Titan, $49.99), subtitled "The Creatures and Plants of the Harry Potter Films". It brings together, through numerous colour illustrations, the artists' concept designs based on the directive that "anatomy and movement should be based on naturalism". Detailed profiles of each creature, such as Inferious, Post Owl and Hippogriff, and each creature's place or role in the specific Harry Potter films, are supplemented  by behind-the-scenes information from the Warner Bros archive.

Terry Pratchett apparently never really forgave J. K. Rowling for replacing him as Britain's top-selling author. Nonetheless, with 75 million books sold worldwide, the Discworld series has proved phenomenally successful. Dragons at Crumbling Castle (Doubleday, $35) brings together 14 stories by Pratchett, written when he was a junior reporter for the Bucks Free Press. The stories are largely reproduced as originally published, although Pratchett has added "a few fine details"  Here, readers will find dragons, dinosaurs, wizards and even an adventurous tortoise. A delightful young adult collection with numerous black and white illustrations.

Justin Richards, creative consultant for Dr Who titles for BBC Books, has compiled Dr Who: The Secret Lives of Monsters (BBC Books, $55). Multiple colour illustrations accompany descriptions, including behind the scenes' insights, to a range of monsters which include the Daleks, the Cybermen and the Weeping Angels.

Douglas Adams, sadly, died too early, at the age of 49,  in 2001. Jem Roberts in The Frood (Preface, $35) has unearthed much new material from the Adams' private archives and interviews with Adams' family and friends. It is therefore subtitled "the authorised and very official history of Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". It also firmly places Adams in the British comedy settings of the 1970s and 1980s, as well as bringing the Adams media production chronology up-to-date.

Another cult media figure is covered even more passionately by Amy Pascale in Joss Whedon: Geek King of the Universe (Aurum, $34.99). Pascale, as an early Buffy "Bronzer",  covers the full creative Whedonverse, including the  popular TV series Buffy, Angel, Firefly and Dollhouse. Pascale's comprehensive overview is supplemented by numerous interviews covering Whedon from his teenage years to his current role as mega-writer and director.

Comic book fans will revel in a beautifully illustrated oversize volume, The Art of the Simon and Kirby Studio (Abrams, $80), edited by Mark Evanier, who did his apprenticeship under Jack Kirby. Evanier provides an authoritative introduction to the comic strips, selected from Joe Simon's private archive. Simon (1913–2011) and Jack Kirby (1917–1994) created several memorable characters in the Golden Age of Comics, such as Captain America and Boy Commandos. This excellent large compendium includes  rare covers and unpublished stories from several genres.

The most popular female comic book hero is Wonder Woman created in in 1941. Harvard historian Jill Lepore's The Secret History of Wonder Woman (Scribe, $45.25) is not just a simple retelling of the Wonder Woman story. Rather, it superbly integrates the biography of Wonder Woman's creator William Moulton Marston, and the remarkable two women in his menage a trois, with the broader perspective of the feminist movement in  20th-century America. The Secret History of Wonder Woman is bound to please on several levels.

Paul Gravett and John Harris Dunning's Comics Unmasked. Art and Anarchy in the UK  (British Library, $55) accompanied the recent British Library exhibition. Dunning, says, "there's always been an underground stream of seditious material in British comic books. It's all about anti-heroes, tearing down the establishment", The profusely illustrated companion ranges over archival sources ranging from Victorian illustrated newspapers to V for Vendetta, Oz magazine and Viz comic. Standout authors and artists include Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore and Grant Morrison.

Another excellent glossy British Library catalogue, Terror and Wonder. The Gothic Imagination (British Library, $55 ) accompanies the exhibition in London which runs until January 2015. Edited by Dale Townshend, it authoritatively traces the various manifestations of the gothic from its  18th-century origins to the present day. Each era of the gothic is reflected through fashion, literature, film, comic books, and public events such as a Goth Festival in Dracula Whitby,

Michael Faber's The Book of Strange New Things (Cannongate, $29.99), which defies genre labelling, is reputed to be Faber's last-ever novel. Peter, a missionary priest is sent by a shadowy multinational to the planet Oasis  to preach to the alien population with "the book of strange new things". Much of the story is told in the correspondence between Peter and his wife, Bea, back on a rapidly disintegrating Earth. Faber brilliantly juxtaposes Peter's personal dislocation with that of Bea to poignantly reflect on love, faith and the nature of relationships.

Finally, for something completely different, seek out The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth (Unbound, $35), which made it onto the 2014 Man Booker Prize longlist. Ingeniously written in a version of Old English, it tells of another apocalyptic world from the perspective of a Lincolnshire "sokeman", who leads a small resistance movement after the 1066 Norman Conquest. The Wake is a mesmerising, if textually challenging, story of the loss of certainty, security and the "triewth" in a disturbed world, which echoes the present.