The Reading Room
There is a wing of this archive where the dice fall silent. The Keeper unlocked it this cycle to receive a crate smelling of old paperbacks and pipe smoke: the records of the Dungeon Dive Book Club — the season the archivist put down the cardboard entirely and picked up the books, then invited the whole village to read along.
What the shelves now hold is a complete institution: the founding charter, the monthly picks and their verdicts, an October tradition of devils and paperback curses, and the announcement of a nine-month pilgrimage to a certain Dark Tower whose echoes still ring elsewhere in these stacks. It ends, fittingly, with a book so treasured the archivist refuses to finish it. The Keeper understands this impulse better than most. Some volumes are not read; they are rationed.
Exhibit Catalogue — the library wing, earliest first:
- Gateways to Abomination by Matthew M. Bartlett — a cult radio station, and a man carrying his own brain into a diner.
- The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty, and the Trilogy of Faith — the scariest novel ever written is also, genuinely, a comedy.
- Dungeon Dive Book Club - Agents of Dreamland — the club’s founding charter, born of a board-game burnout.
- Agents of Dreamland - Book Club Review — Heaven’s Gate, Art Bell, and a fungal cloud past Pluto in 124 pages.
- September Book Club Announcement - The Gods of Pegāna — the poll that quietly seeded a second channel.
- Gods of Pegāna - Book Club review — a sleeping god, a cosmic drummer, and scripture from a world that never was.
- The Dark Tower Re-Read - Book Club — nine months, one notebook per volume; the pilgrimage begins.
- Five (+ one) Killer Works of Horror to Read in October 2020 — Ligotti’s haunted cubicles and a play that reads you back.
- The House on Abigail Lane - Horror Novella Round-Up — a haunted house documented in scholarly footnotes, with live thunder.
- The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger - Ran(King) Part 8 — where the re-read led: the Tower enters the rankings.
- October 2021 Reading Schedule — a month of devils, and hoping to hate the expensive one.
- The Devil is Dead, by R.A. Lafferty — exquisite sentences, impenetrable novel; the archivist concedes the bout.
- The Torturer, by Peter Saxon — a 1967 slasher written before slashers existed, by an author who didn’t.
- The Auctioneer, by Joan Samson — tyranny arrives politely, asking for donations.
- Horror Reading List for October 2022 — the club’s spiritual successor: novelizations for the boy forbidden the films.
- Vermis, by Plastiboo — a guidebook to a game that doesn’t exist, rationed like fine wine.
637 transcripts • 716 posts archived
– The Keeper
Notes that the archivist annotates his favourite series in one notebook per volume, refuses to finish the books he loves most, and hopes to dislike the ones that cost money — and files all three habits under “sound archival practice.”