Dear Mr Price,
I am writing to inform you that darkness is coming.
I have something of yours I must return. Something I…I can’t bring myself to say it.
A book. A book the world should never have seen.
A book of evil. Your book, Mr Price!
It has been over a year since I was first exposed to your curse and in view of that fateful day, my life has been a living nightmare.
I was happy before. We were happy, my wife and I.
We were out shopping for riveting reads and life changing literature when that peddler crossed our path. He said he had in his possession THE book that would change my life forever. He said it would be an experience like no other. He even offered it up at trade price so it was difficult to say no.
But I should have. Now everything good in my life has gone.
I am a shadow of my former self, Mr Price. My psyche is congealed with your tormented text; my mind corrupted with those demented doodles. I have developed severe symptoms of paranoia and anxiety, insomnia, entamophobia and samhnainophobia. My hives are simply untreatable and that’s not the worst of it.
Your book was so disturbing I swore I’d never read it again. I wish I could unsee the things on those pages – that obnoxious little oculus, that malodorous merman and that cranky little circus clown.
Your little book of devils has possessed me! It’s all consuming.
I now read it all day, every day and I have lost everything – my wife, my home, my job, my sanity.
The thing that bothers me most of all is that the book has such a hold over me that I am now unable to read anything else.This isn’t a mild case of bibliophobia – this is something so much worse. I can no longer scan another synopsis or peruse the praise on a pastedown without it knowing. I have tried leaving it at home and going to a public library far away in order to read something, anything else, but the results are always the same; as soon as I look at another book, I am summoned back to caress its binding.
I have read your book more than ten thousand times Mr Price and I can’t bear to look at it another second! I have tried so many times to be rid of the damned thing: tearing, shredding, throwing it in the trash, burying it, burning it even, but it’s no good, it just won’t leave me alone.
But no longer.
I now know what I must do to abolish this tiresome scourge, this literal affliction you have bestowed upon me. The accursed publication must be returned to its wrongful creator.
As I said, the darkness is coming.
Woe betide you Ben Joel Price, woe betide you!
Death Wishes,
Ben Joel Price
Author of At Death’s Door and sinking deeper into a quagmire of madness.
During The Fall he has a tendency of writing toxic letters to himself.
#ADDtocasket
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