But what if that pleasurable book were truly more? A malevolency lying in wait for you to open it? Something that meant to harm you, a thing with a life & sentience of its own? Yet, bibliophile that you are, you cannot resist turning the page ... .
From Chambers' mysterious French play, The King in Yellow, where once read a slow otherworldly incursion happens into reality, to the infamous Necronomicon, Lovecraft's forbidden tome that drives its reader mad with secrets man was never meant to know, three other cursed objets du nuit insidiously inch forward from shelves lurking probably very near you:
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| [Bookcraft by Zarono.] |
Most are familiar with Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Club Dumas (1993) from Roman Polanski's wonderfully satanic film adaptation "The Ninth Gate" (2000). While this is heretical for a literati to say, the ending on "The Ninth Gate" was more satisfying. One of course follows the other, and media comparatives' main objection was Polanski's disposal of the clever parallel literary metaplot because there really wasn't a way to carry that into a film, but in the book it backhands the reader, then kicks them in the face while they're down. (In a "yes, more please" way.)
The book within this book is The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows penned & printed by Aristide Torchia, in Venice (1666), pursued by unscrupulous book detective Richard Corso at the behest of sinister collector Varo Borja. The descriptions of libraries and their contents are nothing short of pornographic for the literarily inclined:
"He looked around at the books on the walls, at their dark, worn spines, and he seemed to hear a strange, distant murmur coming from them. Each of the closed books was a door, and behind it stirred shadows, voices, sounds, heading toward him from a deep, dark place.” (p. 246)
And like Corso, we are lured into finding out if The Nine Gates is just a forgery, or if it is the real deal ... .
Clive Barker's Mister B. Gone (2007) stands as the shortest and most direct of these three. Like a CYOA novel, or a Lemony Snicket ASOUE self-referential offering, the book from the get-go implores you to stop reading, put the book down, and just burn it before you come to a bad end. Which of course makes one want to keep reading. Comical in tone, yet visceral & tragic in parts, the book's own first-person narrator cajoles, threatens, begs, tempts, and bribes you, the reader, to destroy it ... before it somehow destroys you. While this book wasn't as literary as the other two, Barker's conceit is very clever, and he stays an intuitive step ahead of the reader with his living paper vessel in answering their unspoken questions about just what it is they might have gotten themselves in contact with.
Why one would wait nearly a decade & a half before reading The Shadow of the Wind is a question we hope to spare you, and are still beating ourselves up over. This Barcelona lovesong from 2001 is gothic noir at its most exceptional:
"'Didn't Julian have any brothers or sisters?'
The caretaker shrugged her shoulders and let out a sigh. 'I heard rumours that she miscarried once because of the beatings her husband gave her, but I don't know. People love to gossip, don't they? But not me. All I know is that once Julian told the other kids in the building that he had a sister only he could see. He said she came out of mirrors as if she were made of thin air and that she lived with Satan himself in a palace at the bottom of a lake. My Isabelita had nightmares for a whole month. That child could be really morbid at times.'" (p.119)
When young Daniel Sempere comes into possession of the eponymous The Shadow of the Wind, a dark nightmarish smoke scented stranger materializes in pursuit of what may be the last copy of this rare book.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón's dreamlike prose persists like a fog that won't lift, perfectly flowing, only to reveal the hint of a shadowy secret that implies the truth is far larger than one can comprehend. The plot takes our heroes into unavoidable damned-if-you-do investigations and they're swept along by inevitable consequences. The past & present dog all the characters, who're chewed upon by bittersweet yearnings & unrealized desires, only to fulfill them for a golden moment, which is then lost to circumstance. The book is a vault of dark magic that once unlocked will plunge you into its story, willing or no.
We drink the harmful, we smoke the cancerous, we love the undeserving, and we read the forbidden, because we cannot help ourselves. Enjoy & beware, unguarded readers.
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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.
