The Hunter: Horror Recognition Guide, besides having a neat alliterative name, isn't much of a guide—it certainly won't help you with recognition of said horrors.
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I purchased this book for its use as a potential prop in my existing conspiracy game. Although I'm familiar with the World of Darkness and the Hunter setting, I'm not running a Hunter game. I took the marketing text describing the book at face value: "Can be used as a prop in any Hunter: The Vigil game, or can be used by Storytellers and players as a resource from which to draw new encounter and story ideas."
The book contains a series of faux documents: hand-written diary pages, pictures, typed case files, and printouts of email correspondence. Collectively they each tell a tale of a Philadelphia Hunter cell and their encounters with the supernatural. These horrors range from your bog-standard bloodsucker to creepy cats that possess old ladies to alien doctors to something that may or may not be an ogre. In other words, standard World of Darkness stuff: werewolves, vampires, Frankenstein's monsters, dark faeries, mages, and some other weirdness.
As fiction, the stories range from entertaining to tedious. Although the Guide is supposed to be a series of documents collected to tell a story, the various pieces often read as if they were verbatim fiction—which they are. The journals are a little too coherent and verbose. Still, this is all about crafting a story from multiple sources and the premise holds up across the stories.
A few entries stand out. Blood Dolls is about vampires, which at this point have been so thoroughly covered that it's difficult to write anything new and interesting about them. Fortunately, the author gets this and shifts gears from fiction to one of the better pieces in the book—a how-to guide on capturing an inanimate vampire. Unfortunately, the only other place an official document appears dealing with horrors is Gnosopharm, which actually makes mages (if I'm interpreting the story correctly) scary.
Ten Photos, on the other hand, works because it's so utterly unhinged from the tidy hierarchy of horrors in the World of Darkness. The pictures are bizarre and disturbing. Because it's so vague, Storytellers have a lot of leeway to invent the stories behind each photo.
As a role-playing supplement, the Guide is far less successful. Many of the tales are actually resolved by the hunters, leaving a prospective Storyteller without an easy hook to work with. Others are so frustratingly vague as to be of no use – you could just as easily pick up a random weird story from the Internet and use that instead.
Since it's a non-standard size with a wide binding, photocopying the book is problematic. The alternative is to just hand the players the book, which seems a bit overwhelming given that any particular scenario is likely to focus only on one chapter. As an electronic .PDF, the Guide is a much more flexible prop. As a printed book, not so much.
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