I only have the vaguest understanding of what this is. I mean, I know it is a book. But that’s about where my comprehension stops.

Let’s start with the cover. It is actual wood, hand carved. This is why I bought the thing because holy crap, do you not get the best sort of black metal vibes off it? The inscription at the top says, “Death has no mercy, lay down and rot – all paths lead to the grave,” which is delightfully misanthropic. It’s so pure and unpretentious. Made more so by those hinges, which I am pretty sure were bought at a Home Depot. So, yes, while this is an attempt at fabricating some sort of medieval style grimoire, the Phillips head screws – invented in 1930 – really give away the game.

There are wax seals and weird ribbons and a signed front page (apparently this is an edition of 20? I can’t decipher the signature but if you can, or if you know anything about this thing, let me know!). The pages are the parchment-style resume paper and the printing is inkjet. The art is both creepy and clever, often editing medieval woodcuts to have Lovecraftian elements. There is a multicolor effect that is hard on the eyes. Most of the text is verging on illegible. Lots of the art was stretched to fit in Photoshop. Most frustrating, the pages aren’t like, bound. They are glued into a hollow carved out of the wooden spine. So they don’t, like, turn. They just stand up. It is very hard to look through.

This is a fever dream of a book made by someone who had only heard rumors of the existence of books. That said, as weird as this thing is, it is a great Call of Cthulhu prop. Handling this big, heavy, awkward, illegible thing mirrors the grueling experience of reading Mythos tomes as laid out in the Call of Cthulhu rules. It was a real eye opener for my Masks of Nyarlathotep players when they finally realized grimoires in the fiction of Call of Cthulhu aren’t the convenient size of paperbacks (though, historically, they do tend to be rather small!).