I Encourage Literacy

Sorry about yesterday, kids.  Uncle Bob had to make sure his bills were paid.  Because Uncle Bob is trying to be a responsible human being and it only took him 40 years to learn that lesson.

ANYWAY!  It's Wednesday!  My favorite day of the week!  Because I get to be all nerdy and give you TROPEFEST!  You know you love it.  Don't lie.  I can smell it when you lie.

So.  In the past I've covered a few of your basic Lovecraftian tropes.  Alien geometries, monstrosities from beyond, strange town festivals and, Hell, strange towns.  Today will be no different because you aren't writing the damn thing, are you?

Now that we've established the pecking order, today we talk about books.  Books are wonderful!  They allow us to use our imaginations and, when well-written, that isn't very hard at all.  But we're not talking about paperbacks and summer reading lists, here.

Yes, I totally have this t-shirt.

No, we're talking about the books that need to be kept chained up in a cave under several inches of rock and ice that no one should read, EVER because no amount of horrific madness is worth getting on the New York Times Bestseller list.  Reading is fundamental, darlings, but only if it doesn't destroy your brain in the process.  Really, though, I'm less concerned about your brain than I am about, oh, say, the planet.  Earth is a fucking bon-bon to some of the things found in these musty pages.

Cthulhu wants you... to go utterly binkers.

Now, seeing as how this is specifically a book-related trope, it makes sense that it started in books.  Any "grimoire" is considered to be "forbidden reading" because it involves magic and I'm sure that we haven't gone nearly far back enough from an anthropological/archeological standpoint to find the oldest witch diary in history, and why would we?  The furthest back that anyone can find is the Egyptian Book of Going Forth By Day or Book of the Dead.  While it wasn't going to make you go utterly insane, or anything, it was , essentially a book of prayers and spells designed to protect a dead pharaoh in the afterlife, either from demons and monsters in the underworld or to assist in reaching their version of paradise, possessions, cattle and handmaidens in tow.  It WAS, however, only meant for the use of pharaohs so I'm sure a hefty penalty was applied to the common folk if they were discovered using its secrets.  (I'm only hypothesizing, here.  I'm not about to go THAT deep with my research.)

Fast forward about 15 centuries or so and we've got books like the Malleus Maleficarum, which was used to conduct witch trials. Again, no actual madness but it's still pretty dark stuff.  It was also denounced by the Pope at the time so anyone using it was actually acting outside the bounds of the church.  Then there's the Voynich Manuscript which is known as the most mysterious manuscript in the world.  None of its 240 vellum pages have been translated.  Maddening, for sure, but, again, not the actual cause of madness.

Not the Voynich Manuscript.

No, if we want a book that is said to cause madness, we need look no further than كتاب ألف ليلة وليلة.

That, my friends, for those of you who do not speak Arabic (like myself and Wikipedia is a wonderful thing), is none other than One Thousand and One Nights, also known as The Arabian Nights.  Collected during the Caliphate period in Middle Eastern History, The Arabian Nights brings together fairy tales from ancient and medieval Arabic, Persian, Indian, Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Chinese cultures.  While most of us get our ideas about Alladin and Ali Baba from cartoons, this is where these tales were first introduced to English-speaking European society at large in 1706.  Of ALL the books in the world to be considered "forbidden lore" this is pretty much the last one I would pick but I can't do anything about those folks that say you'll be driven mad if you read the whole thing.  It can be found at Project Gutenberg if you want to give it a shot.  Who am I to judge?

This one will drive you crazy in sheer proximity.  Fuck you, Stephenie Meyer.

So, OK.  There are ton of really old books out there that are said to be the real thing but how did this get into my horror fiction much like the proverbial peanut butter in my chocolate?  For THAT, we can blame The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers, published in 1895.  It features a play that both enlightens and sends the reader to Cuckoo-Town.  I'm pretty sure that this would be impossible to stage but I've seen Cats so I'm not really sold on the impossibility.  Chambers is well-known to be influential in the work of guess who?  H. P. Lovecraft.

Lovecraft gave us the Big, Bad, Voodoo Daddy of all forbidden lore, the Necronomicon (which has appeared in COUNTLESS works by many, many authors) but he didn't stop there.  He also wrote of De Vermis Mysteriis, Liber Ivonis, Cultes Des Goules and Die Unsprechliche Kulten (which was the result of a horrible mistranslation since Unsprechliche is closer to "unpronounceable" than "unspeakable").  De Vermis Mysteriis made an appearance in Stephen King's short story Jerusalem's Lot.

Of course, where would we be if we couldn't make fun of these grim volumes?  Much of fiction devotes its time trying to find cute names for horrific, yet child-friendly, evil tomes.  Many a fictional modern paperback has been labeled along the lines of "My First Book of Gibbering Horrors" or "Summoning Satan For Dummies".  That's where my FAVORITE examples come in.

Ook.

Terry Pratchett's Discworld series (which is fucking fantastic and everyone should read all 40 volumes of it RIGHT FUCKING NOW... I'll wait...) started itself off with Rincewind, your stock failed wizard (excuse me... WIZZARD), fighting off the hordes of the ancient and betentacled Dungeon Dimensions when his quest to get rid of the one living spell (that caused all of the others to run screaming from his head MAKING him the failed WIZZARD) goes horribly awry.  This spell came from the Octavo, the book said to be the Creator's diary.  It held the eight spells that brought the Discworld into being.  It's kept under chains at the Unseen University and guarded by The Librarian.  The Librarian has no name because he is an orangutan.  He's a dead shot with a shelled peanut and will beat you senseless if you call him a monkey.  Mind you, this treatment of the manuscript is not to protect the manuscript.  It's to protect the students.

Aside from the Octavo, though, Pratchett gave us a few other volumes to worry about.  Liber Immanis Monstrorum (Monster Book of Monsters), Ge Fordge's Compenydyum of Sex Majik (kept under ice since wizards aren't supposed to be having sex in the first place) and the Necrotelicomnicon (also called the Liber Paginarum Fulvarum, the Book of the Yellow Pages).  Translated as "On communing with the deceased", this book is known not only for driving the reader mad (none of the books affect the Librarian because he's not human) but one unlucky student tried to read it once and he was never seen or heard from again.  The Necrotelicomnicon was several pages thicker after that...  Neil Gaiman borrowed the Necrotelicomnicon for Dream's library in his comic The Sandman and it also made an appearance with his collaboration with Pratchett, Good Omens (which is the funniest anti-Christ novel in the world).

Best!  Cookbook!  EVER!

Now, this trope is somewhat lesser known in film for a couple of reasons.  First off, it's hard to get the special effects budget to work around "book that drives people insane" and second because people don't go to movies to be read to.  It does show up from time to time, though and in a couple of odd places.

Beetlejuice's Handbook for the Recently Deceased definitely counts since it explains important things to know after you die.  The "driven insane" part comes from the fact that it reads like stereo instructions.  In the Mouth of Madness features a book that's truly awful but it's REALLY popular and the "coming soon" movie is heralding the apocalypse.  That abysmal Johnny Depp farce The Ninth Gate features The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows, meant to summon The Devil himself.

The weirdest example I can find, though?  The Care Bears Movie.

Now with 100% more evil!

Yes, you read that correctly.

The fucking CARE BEARS had to go all Care Bear Stare on a Jackie Burroughs-voiced spirit who's trying to remove all caring from the world.

The most recognizable forbidden tome?  The Necronomicom Ex Mortis (not actually related by anything but name to Lovecraft's grimoire) is the source of all of the blood-soaked craziness in the original Evil Dead Trilogy and the 2013 reboot.  Seriously, if you find a damn book in an abandoned cabin in the middle of nowhere bound in human skin, DON'T FUCKING READ IT!!

Mommy?  Tell me a story.  That was not a request.  I'LL SWALLOW YOUR SOUL!

How stupid can people be?

Oh, yeah...

So, there you have it.  It's my personal belief that most people cling desperately to that whole "things man was not meant to know" thing and that's why these books freak us out.  Some moron, in the name of knowledge and/or science, is going to read these books and cause trouble.  Best to leave the unknown alone.

I say screw that.  We can't learn without building on the knowledge of those before us.  Read away.  I'm sure you can get to the part that fixes the problem before everybody's dead, right?

RIGHT?!?