One thing that appears in all of John’s fiction is books and, indeed, most of his characters love nothing more than curling up with cheese and crackers or candy bars and getting lost in the pages of an old, dog-eared, leather bound, Old Spice talc smelling book.
And sometimes we fans can read along, too. Other times, we cannot. For example, upon reading The Lamp from the Warlock’s Tomb for the first time, oh so many years ago, I was rather taken with a passage at the end of the book where Emerson Eells schools young Anthony Monday on the importance of the bell, the book, and candle and how putting each into its proper place will “close the circuit” of a certain magical spell. Eells said he learned such information from the book, On the Restoration of Charmed Circles. Well, as much as I was into Lamp, I eagerly anticipated that I would find Charmed Circles equally spectacular and would enjoy delving into the magic, history, and folklore it discussed.
And for a handful of years, I checked inter-library loan catalogs (because, of course, the local library carried no such title) and then with the Internet I was able to confirm what should have been painfully obvious years ago.
This month we present ten tomes whose titles have sparked mystery, wonder, and may have even prompted someone to spin their wheels looking for a copy only to discover the book really doesn’t exist. In short: fictional books. And we'll say up front the French copy of the Necronomicon Lewis and Bertie find gets an honorable mention, shall we?
Have your read something based on the recommendation from John or Brad’s books? Share your stories with other fans at our forum.
And guess wha – Shhhhhhhh! Miss Eells is on duty!
Editor’s note: we formatted our blandly-overworked Twitter feed years later. The tweets are gone but here is the original list:
- #10. Das Fidgetas Lied und der Deutsche Geist
- #9. Nameless Horrors and What To Do About Them
- #8. Aelfrics Wuldor
- #7. Weird Tales of the Maine Seacoast
- #6. Summa Contra Omnes
- #5. Hardesty's Universal Omnium Gatherum: Perpertual Calendar, Date Book, Almanac, and Book of Days
- #4. Amulets: A Free Inquiry into the Properties of Magical Amulets
- #3. The Dog at the Rome: Famous Pets of Popes
- #2. On the Restoration of Charmed Circles
- #1. The Krankenhammer
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