STEPHEN LEWIS rounds up books to get your teeth into for Hallowe'en.

The witching hour is approaching again. Friday night is Hallowe'en - the eve of All Saints Day, and a time when the veil between this world and the next is at its thinnest. Things will be going bump in the night as the spirits, demons, witches and other unpleasant denizens of the dark come out to play. At least you needn't be worried about vampires, however. Journalist and paranormal researcher Craig Glenday has "rediscovered" an old Victorian handbook, once owned by the renowned vampire hunter Constantine Gregory.

Brush the dust and cobwebs off The Vampire Watcher's Handbook (Piatkus, £9.99) and you'll not only be able to protect yourself and your loved ones on Hallowe'en - you'll even be able to find out if there is a vampire lurking in your midst.

The book - reproduced in a glorious facsimile edition complete with bloodstains, woodcut illustrations of various demons, and handwritten annotations - holds the key to such life and death questions as: is your boyfriend a vampire? (To find out, check if he smells, has a pale complexion, red hair or dirty fingernails).

There are sections on different vampire species; accounts of how to find and identify a vampire; and instructions on the most effective ways of killing them (try staking them through the heart, using a mirror to reflect beams of sunlight at them, sprinkling them with holy water, or repelling them by wearing a braid of garlic).

There is also a description of various vampire strongholds - including, of course, Whitby, where the greatest vampire of them all, Count Dracula, first set foot on these shores.

If you don't have the stomach for fighting vampires, you could always try negotiating with them. Teach Yourself Romanian and Teach Yourself Hungarian (both published by Hodder Arnold at £11.99) contain plenty of handy phrases you could use, depending on where your vampire hails from.

Choose from:

"Get your teeth away from me!"

Romanian: "Luati dintii astia de pe mine!"

Hungarian: "El a fogakkal!"

"Look out, he's behind you!"

Romanian: "Atentie! E in spatele tau!"

Hungarian: Vigyazz! Ott van mogotted!"

"Please could you pass the garlic and the wooden stake?"

Romanian: "Va rog sa-mi treceti usturoiul si teapa de lemn?"

Hungarian: "Ideadna a fokhagymat es a karot?"

If none of those seem to be doing the trick, turn and run.

Rather than actively seeking out a vampire, of course, it may be that you would prefer simply to curl up with a good book and read about them. In that case, you could do worse than Laurel K. Hamilton's latest Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter novel Guilty Pleasures (Orbit, £6.99). "My name is Anita Blake," says the heroine. "Vampires call me the Executioner. What I call them isn't repeatable." Until a serial killer starts murdering vampires and Anita is called in to find the killer....

If vampires aren't your thing and you would prefer to indulge in a little eerie mysticism this Hallowe'en, The Twilight Hour by Simon Marsden (Little, Brown, £25) could be just the thing. Subtitled 'Celtic visions from the past', it is essentially a coffee-table book, filled with delicious, atmospheric photos that accompany Celtic stories, poems and legends, as well as extracts from classics such as Dracula and The Hound Of The Baskervilles.

It's the photos, however, that make this such a winner. Marsden is internationally acclaimed as a photographer of the fantastic and supernatural, and looking at this book you can see why. Gargoyles leer; moonlight dapples the worn stone steps of an ancient, ruined Gothic mansion; a blasted tree reaches bare, despairing limbs up into a darkening sky. A spooky, mystic delight.

Finally, if you're a dedicated fan of all things Celtic and mythological, you could do far worse than dip into In Search Of The Real Middle Earth, by Professor Brian Bates (Pan, £7.99). The book delves into the folk memories, fairy tales and Dark Age legends that underly the work of JRR Tolkein.

The book is not out in paperback until November 7 so you can bone up on the background to Tolkein by the time the final episode of The Lord Of The Rings hits the cinemas on December 17.

Updated: 08:57 Wednesday, October 29, 2003