Sadly, there are some books we’ll never be able to read because they only exist within films and novels. I, for one, would love to get my hands on a copy of George McFly’s A Match Made in Space from Back to the Future (1985) or S. Morgenstern’s Buttercup’s Baby, the sequel to The Princess Bride (1973)—actual author William Goldman only ever wrote one chapter, and so it remains a fictional in-world book (and who knows whether he even intended to write the full sequel or whether he was just messing with everyone).
On the other hand, there are in-story texts that so terrifying that I feel safer knowing they remain locked away in their fictional realms. Here are seven scary and sinister books that I’m glad aren’t actually real.
H.P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon
The most influential and evil imaginary book of all time is likely the Necronomicon, a.k.a The Book of the Dead, which is purported to have been written by the fictional Abdul Alhazred. It makes its first appearance in “The Hound” (1924) and is mentioned in some of Lovecraft’s best known stories, including At the Mountains of Madness (1936) and “The Dunwich Horror” (1929). Details from within the book itself are sparse, but it is known to contain instructions for summoning otherworldly deities.
The Necronomicon shows up in film adaptations of Lovecraft’s works, but it also plays a key role in the Evil Dead movies. There are a few different versions of the book throughout the franchise (this video breaks them down!), but they all contain demon-unleashing incantations and they often appear to be bound in human skin, with a flayed face stretched across the cover. One of the Evil Dead versions of the book even makes a cameo appearance in Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993).
A few “real” versions of the Necronomicon have been released over the years, including the Simon Necronomicon in 1977, which has almost no connection to Lovecraft’s mythos, and Necronomicon: The Wanderings of Alhazred in 2004, which is as faithful as possible to Lovecraft’s writings. Although these books can be said to physically exist, they thankfully lack the fictional Necronomicon’s dark magic.
The Book of Names from Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country (2016)
While certainly inspired by Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, The Book of Names from Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country is deserving of its own entry on this list. This is because it’s basically the opposite of the Necronomicon, in that instead of bringing about death, its intention is life and creation. But of course, the book is still decidedly dangerous. Spells from the book can grant invulnerability and resurrect the dead (in a non-zombie way), and there’s even a recipe for a metamorphosis potion.
When our cast of characters first encounter The Book of Names, they initially mistake it for the Necronomicon, and Ruff slips in a mention of the fact that Lovecraft didn’t understand Arabic names, with “Abdul Alhazred” being a grammatically incorrect invention.
Invocations from Hereditary (2018)
We readers know that books are filled with invaluable knowledge, and that holds true in horror movies too. Near the beginning of Ari Aster’s Hereditary, Annie (Toni Collette) starts to go through a box of her recently deceased mother’s things, finding a photo album and some books; one of the texts, Notes on Spiritualism, contains a note from her mother. It brings up memories from her troubled childhood, so she shuts the box and puts it out of her mind. This proves to be a big mistake—especially considering the supernatural occurrences that her family have started experiencing.
[Spoiler warning for Hereditary, if you haven’t seen it.]
Near the end of the movie, Annie finally returns to the box and pulls out a book called Invocations. She reads about King Paimon, a powerful male demon who has the face of a woman and seeks to inhabit a male host. She also goes through the photo album and it reveals that her mother was the leader of a cult who worshiped this demon. The whole family ends up dead, with the body of Annie’s son Peter (Alex Wolff) being used as a vessel for Paimon. If only poor Annie had read Invocations earlier.
Sutter Cane’s Novels from In the Mouth of Madness (1994)
Although it’s not one of my favorite John Carpenter movies, In the Mouth of Madness has a fantastic concept. Fictional horror author Sutter Cane (surely a thinly veiled reference to Stephen King) has gone missing along with the highly anticipated manuscript of his next book, In the Mouth of Madness. An investigator (played by Sam Neill) is sent to find the popular author, but finds himself starting to doubt reality when the nightmarish creations from the pages of Cane’s books begin to materialize in real life. In the Mouth of Madness is filled with Lovecraftian cosmic horror and also briefly features Hayden Christensen (best-known for playing Anakin Skywalker) in his first movie role.
Mister Babadook from The Babadook (2014)
The scares in Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook begin after six-year-old Sam (Noah Wiseman) asks his widowed mother Amelia (Essie Davis) to read him a pop-up book called Mister Babadook. Despite never having seen the book before (major red flag!), she begins reading. The pages become increasingly sinister in their depiction of the titular Babadook, a large supernatural humanoid creature (and eventual queer icon, thanks to the internet), which later seems to come to life to haunt Amelia and Sam.
Amelia tears up the book and throws it out, but it reappears and the previously blank pages are now filled with warnings from the Babadook. Next, she tries burning the book, but still the big bad Babadook continues to terrorize them.
Mister Babadook was actually made into a real book by Insight Editions—although an accompanying appearance from the Babadook is not guaranteed upon reading. It’s a near-perfect replica of the book from the movie, but with the addition of a few extra pages. Copies were extremely limited, but a flip-through of the book can be seen in this video.
The Book of Accidents from Chuck Wendig’s The Book of Accidents (2021)
The Book of Accidents kicks off with Nate moving back to his childhood home with his wife Maddie and their son, Oliver. Nate suffered an abusive childhood at the hands of his now-dying father and when he moves back to the house he begins to see ghosts. Maddie and Oliver are also having their own bizarre experiences, with Maddie suffering blackouts and Oliver befriending a boy called Jake who can apparently do magic.
[Spoiler warning ahead.]
The titular Book of Accidents belongs to Jake, and in order to entice Oliver he produces objects out of thin air using his so-called spellbook. But that’s not all the book can do. As its name suggests, it is literally a logbook of accidents that happened in a mine, but it’s also a powerful magical text that allows Jake to traverse alternate dimensions. He’s been systemically destroying these other worlds and Oliver’s is the last one standing. Being able to dimension-hop via a book sounds fun in theory, but allowing that power into the wrong hands isn’t worth the world-ending risk.
The Spellbook from Hocus Pocus (1993)
Winifred Sanderson’s spellbook in Hocus Pocus feels a bit like the Disneyfied version of the Necronomicon. Aside from the fact that both books are grimoires, they’re both bound in human skin, and the Hocus Pocus version even features a bulbous eye, which echoes the grimacing facial features on the Evil Dead rendition of the eldritch tome. The pages of Winnie’s sentient spellbook, which she affectionately addresses as “Book,” contain witchy words and recipes that can turn people into immortal cats and raise the dead—but Book does prove that it has a heart (metaphorically, of course) in the 2022 sequel. Still, its pages hold dangerous incantations and so, in the words of Thackery Binx, “Nothing good can come from this Book. You got it?!”
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Are there any other horrifying or menacing books from fiction and/or movies that I’ve missed in the list above? Let me know in the comments below!
Lorna Wallace has a PhD in English Literature and is a lover of all things science fiction and horror. She lives in Scotland with her rescue greyhound, Misty.
Well, there’s Pratchett’s Necrotelicomnicon, aka Liber Paginarum Fulvarum (Latatian: “Book of yellow pages”), the Phone Book of the Dead. Makes summoning so much simpler, but the long distance charges can be killing.
Marvel has the Darkhold, a book of dark magic that originated in the comics, and has a not insignificant role in the MCU ( appearing in, iirc,Multiverse of Madness, Wandavision, Agents of Shield and Runaways
My first thought was of the Book of Friends from the manga and anime Natsume Yuujinchou (Natsume’s Book of Friends). Compiled by the main character’s grandmother some 50 years previously, the book contains the names by which sundry demons and kami can be summoned and bound. While that is not menacing in and of itself, when one is known to possess the book, one becomes a target for every power-hungry critter out there and menace comes a-stalking.
See also The King in Yellow (1895) by Robert W. Chambers. A collection of connected short stories, some of which are set in an imagined future 1920’s, a recurring element is an unperformed play titled “The King in Yellow,” which, when read, causes insanity.
There are several such texts in Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, which ultimately transform the world.
The Book of the Dead and Book of the Living from The Mummy and The Mummy Returns. Do not read from the Book of the Dead.
Any Leitner from The Magnus Archives….
… but especially A Guest for Mr. Spider.
“Highly Unpleasant Things It Is Sometimes Useful to Know” and “Things It Is Not Good to Know at All” from “One For The Morning Glory” by John Barnes.
“Du Svardenvyrd” from “Memory, Sorrow and Thorn” by Tad Williams
In Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s “The Club Dumas” there was the De Umbrarum Regni Novem Portis (Of the Nine Doors of the Kingdom of Shadows).
Don’t forget the Death Note from the eponymous manga/anime. A notebook in which one can write the name of a person to bring about their death. Various characters figure out a series of neat “hacks” as the series goes on, some of which are a surprise even to the shinigami that originally owned the book.
The only catch is that one needs to know the true name (so aliases and initials won’t work) and the face of their victim (to avoid accidentally killing the wrong person).
I also just remembered the titular “Liber Calvarum” from Robert Silverberg’s 1972 The Book of Skulls. Best to leave that one alone too.
In The Information by Martin Amis (which isn’t otherwise SF/F, but I think this plot device counts), there’s a character who writes such dense/ambitious/pretentious prose that reading even a small amount of his huge experimental novel (called Untitled) causes random physical ailments and injuries to the reader. The only person who manages to get through it is a violent sociopath with no imagination, who calls it “very readable.”
There’s the unnamed Book in GK Chesterton “The Blast of the Book”, which causes anyone who opens it to be snatched away by the Devil
They that looked into this book
Them the Flying Terror took
…or does it?
In the Harry Dresden books, the White Council ensures there’s a reasonable number of books like the Necronomicon in circulation so that if anyone uses the rituals in them, there’s only enough power left to invoke some mild bad luck.
Terry Brooks’ Ildatch came to mind.
John Connolly’s Fractured Atlas.
Not quite as hardcore as many of these, but the story book from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019).
@13 – Sounds a bit like Vogon poetry?
@7 – I think that my favourite Leitner is the book from MAG 70. Every page details someone’s gruesome death, starting in Mediaeval times; and then when you get to the last page with writing on it, you find a description of your own forthcoming death, always horrible. And if you go back and try to re-read it, the details change and the date gets closer.
Also, there was an anthology horror series that CBC Radio made in the 1980s, and one of the episodes was called “The Book of Hell.” It was about a publishing house receiving a mysterious manuscript from an author who had been dead for years, describing in excessive detail the suffering of souls in Hell.
DS9, Season 7’s ‘Kosst Amojan’, I mean, you need to drip blood on it to read it, and the text appears through flames, for crying out loud…..
PC Hodgell’s Chronicles of the Kencyrath Series is an under-appreciated high fantasy series and features the “Book Bound In Pale Leather.” A creepy tome of words of power. It seems to have a mind of its own and will appear unexpectedly and usually where and when it is not welcome. Also its pale leather binding will get goosebumps if left out in the cold.
… that thankfully aren’t real
OR ARE THEY oOOooOOOoOoOoOoooOOo…
Lest we forget Beetlejuice’s Handbook for the Recently Deceased.
Tobin’s Spirit Guide (Ghostbusters)
Unaussprechliche Kulte (also known as Nameless Cults or the Black Book) from Robert E Howard
Although the texts in Hereditary are not real, the demon Paimon is “real”, in the sense that real-world texts talk about him — notably The Lesser Key of Solomon.
Not quite as awful as many of these and only marginally genre (if that) – NP, the titular collection of short stories in Banana Yoshimoto’s NP. A renowned Japanese author wrote his final collection in English, then committed suicide before he could translate them into Japanese. Three more people attempting to translate the collection met the same fate. The implication is that there’s something subtly inimical about these stories that only becomes apparent in the author’s first language.
@26: I know that Lovecraft used Unaussprechlichen Kulten by von Junst as one of the terrible books kept out of general circulation at the Miskatonic University library, in his Cthulhu Mythos stories; I’d forgotten Howard had a version of it as well. Cf the Lovecraft wiki for more.
Let us not forget The Book Of Eibon, a fictitious grimoire created by Clark Ashton Smith. Often mentioned in HPL’s stories; fully discussed n the H.P. Lovecraft Wiki.
There’s always the classic two-act play, The King in Yellow chronicled in four short stories written by Robert W. Chambers. Once you read it or even browse through it, your perceptions change, and realities around you change. Once that happens, results in tragic death and madness. It was published in 1895 roughly.
Sheri S Tepper’s novel The Visitor has The Book of Fell. A sentient infectious malicious controlling book with many puppets. However, knowing about it is very close to being a spoiler. Sheri is a master of dark conspiracies.
@1: The Liber Paginarum Fulvarum also makes an appearance in the first issue of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. That was in 1989, only two years after it appeared in Pratchett’s work; Gaiman and Pratchett were already friends, and in fact were working together on Good Omens at the time, so in retrospect its appearance seems like an in-joke between the two of them.
(When I looked up the information above, I was startled by how long ago Good Omens was first published, and how (relatively) early it came out in Pratchett and Gaiman’s writing careers; in fact, it was Gaiman’s first novel.)
With regard to Lovecraft Country and the name “Abdul Alhazred” being grammatically incorrect in Arabic, the role-playing game The Call of Cthulhu includes (or included) an essay on the same topic, which corrected the name of the Mad Arab to the rather more grammatical “Abd al-Azrad,” and went on to interpret the names of some of Lovecraft’s other Old Ones, such as Yog-Sothoth and Shub-Niggurath, as mangled versions of the “original” Arabic versions. (Since Lovecraft’s own created history of the Necronomicon portrayed it as having been translated from Arabic to Greek, then from Greek to Latin, and finally from Latin to English (by John Dee), the mangling is explained in part as a result of errors in translation.)
(According to Wikipedia, the essay in question first appeared in Cthulhu Companion in 1983, then was incorporated in to the rulebook for the game’s 4th edition in 1989 and its 5th edition in 1992, which is where I saw it; I do not know whether later editions have retained it or not.)
Since this one, to the best of my knowledge, is only released in Danish, it is hardly an oversight.
“Ouifael’s Book” by Danish author Palle Vibe, tells two stories, a couple of decades apart. In the first part, a couple of children get a hold of a forbidden book locked up in the uncle’s library and read it in hiding. Just reading it conjures an ominous entity. This entity is not revealed except for a few signs of it, namely a few small clay-like figures appearing in the yard outside. Fire and psychosis amass and we fast forward to modern day (1978).
The book reappears in the hands of a psychiatrist and, once again, reading it causes the tiny clay figures to manifest themselves outside; figures that turn out to be made from human flesh. The poor doctor is slowly brought to madness as he tries to dig for the book’s secrets.
The book’s first half is incredibly sinister and very effective horror writing. It does, however, go a bit down-hill towards the end but is overall still very readable. Palle Vibe re-released the book 30 years later in another name “Oriuagor’s Prophecy”, but the editing has a horror in and of itself, and ruined the book completely. The original print from 1978 is almost as rare as the eponymous book.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10775352-oiufaels-bog
Laird Barron’s “Black Guide”, or “Moderor de Caliginis” from his short story “Mysterium Tremendum” is a truly evil book definitely worth mentioning.
In the movie Come Play there is a menacing children’s picture book, in digital format that, that brings forth a (massively distorted) lonely boy who just wants someone to come and play with him.
I love the illustrations in it and would die for a copy. (Pun intended)
In John Bellairs’s The Face in the Frost, there is a wonderfully evil book, though it has no title that I recall. It contains seriously disturbing illustrations, and has an inclination to send the reader mad as they begin to learn the secrets of magic that the book contains. The viewpoint character, a wizard named Prospero (“and not the one you are thinking of, either”) must face a former classmate who is using the book to gain power.
A good read for light fantasy fans.