Katherine Black (2025) The Book.

Reading is what I do. A book called The Book? That’s an intriguing idea. It had me thinking of Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story, The Bottled Imp. Like The Book, the Bottled Imp had an illustrious history of previous owners. It granted great power and wealth. The Book allowed psychiatrist insight and access to what would happen in the ward in which Dr Alice Grant worked. A simple green cover. The Book had turned up in the little hospital library, one of many books.

Manifestation is the first stage of possession. Like The Bottled Imp, The Book was indestructible. Alice tried flinging it in a skip. But The Book always boomeranged back. It would sit waiting for her to open its pages.

Disbelief becomes belief. Everything Alice Grant-ed has worked for and cherished, including her partner and soul mate Mick, turns to shit. Keawe glimpses The Bottle Imp and he is not the same carefree person. Alice feels the power of hell around her. Yet the book obsesses her. It’s all she cares about. Locking herself in her office at work and reading The Book.

Marshall McLuhan, a media theorist, famous aphorism, ‘We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us’ applies to teenagers and their smartphones and Alice with The Book of life lessons. She has to know everything and has to know it now. The book possesses her. It owns her and it’s taking Mick along for the ride.

A moral dilemma. The get-out clause. Your pain is my gain. Keawe can sell The Bottle Imp but he knows he’s selling hell not heaven, yet he must persist and insist.

Alice tries giving the book away to a professor who specialises in Voodoo and has an interest in man-made artefacts like The Book. She covets its power. A perfect fit.

But The Book finds her tiresome. It has agency in the way that those that come up against its power and the dark arts of understanding do not. Even though they imagine they have free-will. It chooses the path. Who to follow and its followers in the way The Bottled Imp does not? And it chooses Alice and Mick.

‘Broken is the promise never given.

The weight of truth will tip the scale.

Offer that which is most precious,

and the path will never fail.’

Riddles. Katherine Black is the author of seventeen previous novels. (My favourite remains the autobiographical and the long out of print Thanks for the Vodka, 2003). There’s something of a  Lizard’s Leap in the ending. Read on.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0F2J7QYCQ