While life often fails to reward our deepest desires, there are at least those exquisite moments in which one discovers that a book being read by a character in a fictional work also exists in real life, and can be obtained. This series seeks to honor that experience.
–
To begin, S. 3, Ep. 2 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Dead Man’s Party,” Rupert Giles is reading a tome in which he finds a picture of the tribal mask that Joyce Summers has just purchased, and he says “good lord” or something since he realizes that this mask raises the dead. “Look at my mask, isn’t it pretty? It raises the dead. Americans!”
A pause, a close look at the screen, and some dedicated guesswork reveal that the title of the tome in question is “The Picture Museum of Sorcery, Magic, and Alchemy” – and the specific chapter is “Pacts with Demons.”
Well, this book actually exists. The picture of the mask that Giles finds, tragically, does not. They superimposed that image. But everything he sees on the rest of that page and the one facing is real.
I know this because I bought and briefly possessed the book. After reading the first few chapters, I got slightly genuinely creeped out. The French author takes a bit too-ghoulish pleasure in his subject matter – people being hauled away into darkness after consigning their souls to the devil, and all that.
After a while, I began to feel semi-convinced that the book was somehow casting a pall over the room. The reasonable explanation for why things were not going perfectly in my life was obviously the presence of M. Degivry’s book. So I donated it to the Salvation Army. Which doesn’t sound very admirable, now that I think of it, but I didn’t mean it that way at the time.
No comments:
Post a Comment