For Rye Gavin Gardiner (best book club books for discussion TXT) 📖

his wife being DEAD in the DIRT, one thought remained in Mr Harper’s mind: not every question needs an answer, dammit.

So he’d inadvertently accumulated a shop’s worth of books, opened said shop full of books, and was now effectively running a free library only a few ‘customers’ made use of. And all the while those ludicrous crates sat gathering dust in the storeroom.

The girl had figured some of this out for herself, and some of it he’d shared with her. She sensed, to the degree with which a girl her age could, his gestures of kindness were not fully altruistic; she knew he was getting something from letting her borrow any book she liked. His payment was company.

She also knew, better than he did, what her father would do if he knew of the books she had unlimited access to. What she didn’t know was what he would have done had he caught her with one of the books from the alcove, that mysterious, forbidden alcove. Namely because she didn’t know what was in there.

‘Anything, young Wakefield!’ Mr Harper would bellow, a face like sunlight. ‘Ever hear the story of Aladdin? Well this,’ he’d said, sweeping his hands across the shelves, ‘is your cave, and I’m your genie!’

The girl had glanced at the back of the shop towards the alcove. Clouds suddenly obscured the sunlight of the man’s face. Yes, he knew about her father alright. His wife had been well connected and she’d shared with him just about every rumour in Millbury Peak. There was even a chance he knew Renata’s father better than most. Maybe, just maybe, there were reasons he’d stopped attending service besides his loss of faith. Yes indeed, he knew of the man, and he knew just how angry a copy of Pride and Prejudice might make him, let alone something from the alcove. Oh yeah, he knew the rumours, and for once he believed them.

‘You will NOT go near those books, Miss Wakefield,’ he’d said through the clouds. ‘Not one of them. Do I make myself clear?’

The alcove had then been stripped. This dark pocket of the shop was now bare, and over the following months nothing but dust would grace their shelves. For a time, consumed by her lust for the rest of the shop, the girl forgot about the forbidden area. The stories lining these walls seemed infinite. Whilst these endless pages were available to her, she would never need another book.

Until she did.

‘Man the deck, me hearty!’ said Mr Harper one day as he limped on an imaginary peg leg towards the shop door. ‘Need to find us some pirate’s grub, I do!’

As Mr Harper headed down the street, leaving the girl flicking through a Gustave Flaubert novel she’d read twice already, she found her eyes drifting to the bare shelves of the alcove. He’d never left her alone before now, and the unexplored territory called to her. What were these accursed texts that could land her in more trouble than anything else in the shop?

She replaced the Flaubert and crept towards the empty alcove, keeping an eye on the shop window for any sign of Mr Harper. The shelves were indeed bare, but the alcove was not completely empty.

The whistling that suddenly approached the shop was, to the girl, an air raid siren. Without a moment to even look at the cover of the battered paperback she’d spotted hiding on the floor under a shelf in the alcove, she’d rammed it into her coat pocket and rushed to a neighbouring shelving unit, pretending to be engrossed in a Madeleine L’Engle fantasy. Mr Harper stepped through the front door carrying cups of soup and hot rolls, none the wiser.

And now, back in the safety of her clock tower, there’s an intruder. She knows it’s there, waiting patiently in her coat. Already she’s been here for hours; the night has drawn in and a biting wind is piercing through the little stone room like a spear. She should be in bed. They all think she’s in bed, but she’s here, finally ready to confront the demon that’s been awaiting her all evening. Heart racing, she reaches into her coat.

Under the lantern’s light the book is unassuming. Tame, even. The classics she’d worked through were bibles, thick as logs with pages thinner than air. This thing is slender, its cover illustration laughably cheap. She whispers its title:

Horror Highway

Quentin C. Rye

She giggles at the cover and its name. It’s like throwing a white sheet over a kitten and hoping people will run screaming from the ghost. Just a cheap paperback, she thinks. Can’t fool me. She giggles again.

For the final time, she giggles.

She believes, after the tomes she’s conquered, she can digest the book by quickly skimming through its pages. She begins to flick.

A little boy is told to slip the tip of a sharpened blade into his baby sister’s soft skull in order to save the lives of his parents. He complies.

A man chokes through shattered teeth, their jagged tips sticking from his raw gums like tiny fangs. He is fed his own genitals.

Through blood and tears a woman screams as she is raped in a shadowy alley to an audience of cheering hobos.

The girl’s tears dot the pages. She can’t stop flicking. Why can’t she stop flicking?

Eyelids removed, tiny games of noughts and crosses carved into corneas with a drawing pin; holes drilled under fingernails and down the length of each digit, bleach funnelled into the fleshy shafts; broken glass sandpapered into skin, broken glass, all over, sandpapered, skin, over and over and over and—

Pages roll by. Death, torture, and pain wash over her.

Then she finds it.

A flaming pickup truck tears through a lone woman standing in the middle of the road, her emerald green dress flapping madly in the wind as metal rips her