beware of the book.

There are points as readers where a text involves us, that thing we hold & read with intimate exploration interacts with us, and when we reach the end we are hopefully dazzled enough to wish it were more than just a book, and if successful, made to feel as if it really is.



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:

[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+.

the Secret of the Golden Bowl.

The singing bowl haunts me, its note following me hundreds of miles away from that back alley music shoppe hidden within the depths of San Francisco's Chinatown.



I ran the striker hard around the bowl's lip and suddenly the space just filled with ringing as if out of nowhere. Or maybe an unheard sonaressence pulled from the corners of the room into the bowl and poured out again, an invisible but tangible aural reflection.



It made me wonder if there were bowls that sang, like celestial choirs, or others, a dark portal of lowest basso pouring up from an Abyss. Genesis stories state that matter gets created from sound, God conjuring the world from The Word, and the Aum, same as song evoking an emotion from nothing.



I asked an esotericist I know about the bowls and he mentions the blocks of the pyramids, after somehow getting treated, being lifted with a tap from a resonant staff or tuning fork (perhaps our ankh ...). I think of lamas & saffron robed priests levitating in their Himalayan temples, attuning themselves, perhaps with the bowls as a focusing tool. I'm sure my odd source also thinks of rounded saucers with their otherworldly humming being a slight friction against the atmosphere as they spin & turn at high velocity -- ships also rumoured to land or originate from within the Earth's highest mountain ranges.



Apparently around since 11th century BCE, the bowls were made with a now lost technology that used 5 to 12 metals, including amounts of silver and gold, all of which seems alot of trouble for a simple bell or container for offerings, so there's more here than meets the ear. On a molecular level everything vibrates. If you place one singing bowl near a silent one including some of the same metals, it will begin to sing.



Silver's negative charge attracts particles, and gold's noble and electrically conductive qualities may have factored in the forger's choice of materials for the bowls. The older the bowl, the darker a tarnish it has, affecting the tone.



Listen to the still, to the silence where there's supposedly absence. Instead you'll hear presence, the hum of yourself & your echo reflected back, a low roar awash with subtlety, as blood passing through artery and vein. Call this frequency or soul or anima or chi, the bowls reveal the ringing that is everywhere to begin with.



Last week, dozens of dealers in imported wares brought bowls into Tucson to sell at our international gem show. After playing hundreds of bowls, many centuries old if not unknowingly older, I found the bowl that hummed my song, a deeply shadowed opera conducted in infinite wavicles that push and flow through the invisible so hard you can feel it through your very skin.



With the right bowl one could summon the prima materia sound, to fill the bowl with intent, as a magician does a cauldron, and then send it out with the sound's return to whence it emanated to act on that will & wish from within, to affect the timbre & fibre of existence, to destroy, to refine, to reform, to remake the World. That is the secret of the Golden Bowl.

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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+.