Bookshelves

I'm showing you these in case I don't have time to find, or forge, any more. I haven't finished writing the book yet, so forgive me if I misremember or omit any details of the story as I know it, I say, as I shuffle through my bedroom, picking up and moving around a variety of books I have scattered everywhere.
      You decided to enter, so while I had the chance I wanted to show at least someone my life's work. To have anyone to tolerate my fantasies is a luxury I didn't believe myself worthy to be afforded.
      I'm sorry if it's a little boring, or self indulgent, feel free to have a seat, I say, as you sit down on the mattress I have on the floor. No bedframe.
      Let's see, best if we start at the beginning, I say as I grab the first book from one of my shelves, a small and scruffy paperback that was prominently displayed. It's the start of everything really, The Canticle of Satan by Dr. Jonathan Hubbur. First published by Arkham House in 1959. I have no idea how he managed to convince them to carry it, but he must not have been very convincing as it was only ever released in a limited run of a couple hundred copies. It's a rather short work subdivided into nine sections, each one corresponding to one of the Dark Gods as he called them, clusters of powers and associations that he'd apparently see in his daily life while doing something as mundane as taking a walk through town. It mostly consists of poetry and short stories and lacks the theoretical rigour of his later work. I think the best way to describe it would be as the first attempt at a work of Satanic Qabbala, it's absolutely infested with an obsessive gematria right down to its very conception. An unforgiving way to describe it would be the Sefer Yetzirah for edgelords.
      On the other end of the spectrum you have a work from one of his old colleagues, I say, shuffling over to grab another slim volume, much more clinical and academic. Here we have The Apocryphon of Belial, a literary forgery from Dr. Nicholas Bodin. He made his reputation by compositing a variety of Sufi mystics into one purported author, Sayyid Tal al-Rasha, described as a heterodox Islamic mystic from Egypt who lived and wrote during the 9th century, and who died by being burned to death in the town square. The work itself is presented as a translation of his Apocalyptic poetry that he received from his dialogues with various demons, all from Talmudic demonology rather than any of Islamic or pre-Arabic origin. By the way, did you ever read my copy of Cyclonopedia? Nevermind. Dr. Bodin apparently went to very great lengths to ensure the material veracity of his forgeries, tracking down a variety of papyri and inks that would've fooled any radiocarbon dating. I'm sure his training as a philologist helped. It all ended the same, his career was almost ruined.
      To round out the triptych, we have another short work from a colleague of both Hubbur and Bodin, I continue, pulling out a small white book, as your ass starts to hurt a little. You shuffle your legs. Her name was Dr. Anastasia Roseberry and she wrote The Conventicles of the Nine Angels as an introduction to her own system of Christian mysticism. It appears to be an interesting blend of Merkavah and Hekhalot practices with the scrying and invocation techniques of John Dee, but unlike him she records her communication with angels in remarkably clear language. In the early 70's she could only get it published with a press known for New Age literature. You've seen the anime Evangelion, right? Some of the angels she invoked ended up having their names used in it. A few of the writings in the book are quite erotic and others depict the angels as bored and uncaring, almost monstrous.
      Returning back to Dr. Hubbur, we have what many consider to be his masterpiece, The Splendor of the Final Harvest in three volumes. It was the last thing he finished before a visit to China during the Cultural Revolution that had a dramatic influence on his political thinking, if it even existed yet. I haven't managed to finish reading it all since it's about 900 pages in total, but it's a far reaching extension of his earlier work, with a systematic and apocalyptic ambition. In the preface he breaks with any attempt to categorize his own occult system as a variety of Satanism and establishes his intent to focus the first volume exclusively on the Dark Gods that he presented in his first book. But, while distancing his own polytheistic divinities from Satanism, he proceeds with another ambitious project. In the second volume, he sets out to create the heresy of all heresies, where he attempts to establish Satanism as not only a denomination of the Abrahamic religions, but their ultimate completion, with Judas as the final prophet. He reaches the eschatological conclusions of his theology in the third volume, and prophesizes that when Gaubni awakens and aligns the wills of the Nine Dark Gods with that of the Accursed Son, the Final Harvest will begin, collapsing Time and Imagination and bringing about the Aeon of All Aeons, I say as I stop for breath. I'll tell you more about it later.
      I can tell you're getting a little tired so I walk to the kitchen to grab croissants and powdered lemonade, which I bring in strawberry shaped mugs. You look around at my floor, covered in clothes and trash and loose grains of rice. I bend down to grab a book from a shelf closer to my floor, lifting it up to offer it to you. You thumb through the pages.
      The forgery scandal should've been the end of Dr. Bodin's career, but it wasn't. That right there is his first philosophical work, the Critique of Pure Terror, conjured originally as a bizarre experiment commissioned by the Department of Defense. It's a little long, almost a neat 400 pages. His intellectual project from this period as a whole was essentially a justification of the United States's worst excesses of the Vietnam War, understood through the lens of the Cosmic Theory of Geotrauma and napalm pyrodemonism. A sequel was written but only ever published as a serial in a magazine marketed to potential mercenaries for the Rhodesian Bush War, as his increasingly controversial reputation made it harder and harder for him to publish even with all of his personal connections. Strangely, I haven't managed to find any records that establish Dr. Bodin as a white supremacist, he seems to have viewed state terror as a means in itself, directed towards some grand anti-cosmic teleology. A sick experiment, really.
      I get up to walk to a different shelf, covered with works of classical Marxism and a collection of zines from Fourth Sword Publications. Your eyes drift to my metal bust of Vladimir Lenin next to a crystal tetrahedron.
      All of Dr. Hubbur's works after his visit to China are marked by a radical shift in his political commitments towards communism. In his collection of fictional and theoretical writings titled Philosophy of the Acausal he attempts what most would describe as an irresponsible project: a naked and unashamed communist mysticism. It culminates in two other books, one a history of philosophy and the other an attempt to work out his positive vision of aeonic materialism, which is what he describes as the occult undercurrent of all political thought. They were the last things he wrote before he died. He never gave up the Nine Dark Gods, or his Final Prophet. I wonder if he saw them again.
      I return to the first shelf I started with, black and unadorned.
      Now we finally get to the weirder stuff in my collection. Have I ever gone on to you about the Tempel ov Blood? It's because I met someone who was a member, he called himself Commissar Murnau and I met him while I was corresponding with the editorial board of a Maoist magazine called Struggle Sessions. Around the time I started talking with him he manged to get himself onto it as part of his insight role. I have a collection of his writings along with the few other people he was working with at the time, I pass a black book to you, with an ominous occult sigil on the cover, it's called Liber 333. When you open it up, it's covered in dried blood.
      After the Tempel dissolved he went on to start another occult organization with a few other people he had met who were all studying the works of Dr. Hubbur and Dr. Bodin together. One of the members was really into retro internet stuff so she ended up finding an ancient BBS called Shadowside that had digitized and republished a lot of their works. There was another girl named Bruja del Sur who compiled a lot of it into a book that they published with Commissar Murnau's Black Skull Press. She also edited a single volume edition of Dr. Hubbur's Splendor. I have both of them laying around over there, I say, gesturing vaguely towards one of my shelves.
      There's a couple books that I have from an author I honestly made up, her name's Elizabeth Elliot. I felt there needed to be a midway point between Dr. Bodin and Commissar Murnau. Her earliest work, The Trial of Countess Bathory, was published by a university press from a fictional U.S. state that you won't find on any map, I go on, your eyebrow raising, wondering if any of this is going to go anywhere. There's a second character like that, they exist and they don't. Rumata Gracchi, an old psuedonym of mine from my Maoist days. They wrote works of philosophy that I'll never have time to see to completion.
      I walk over to my desk and open up one of its shelves, pulling out a stack of a few last books.
      These are my greatest inventions, the books I felt compelled to write and compile, I pass them over to you, as you shuffle through each one. The first is black and red and resembles the book from the Tempel ov Blood that I showed you earlier. In bright red you can read Liber 909, attributed to the Temple of the Red Lodge. On the table of contents you see it divided into nine sections, each one accompanied by a photograph of the anonymous members of the Red Lodge, typically armed. In light beige you read the title of the next, Struggle Sessions: Selected Works 199-203. The title's a little weird on that one, I used the same calendar as the Temple of the Red Lodge. It starts from the birthday of Karl Marx. My motivation for editing that one was rather strange, at the time I had been reading House of Leaves and thought I had it in me to edit together something similar while I was learning how to typeset. It's my most personal work but probably my least original, I look at your hands with a nervous anticipation as you look through the rest.
      The last two were written together, mostly by the pen of Commissar Murnau. A character I sometimes wish I never created. Gates of Moss is his post-apocalyptic novel, written in the midst of an inconclusive civil war for control over the territory of the continental United States after near complete ecological collapse. It's essentially the product of anxieties over the political fragmentation and Balkanization of the U.S. and his own expulsion from the Red Lodge, written mostly during the second Trump era but attributed to a false date. You're holding the only physical copy, I say, as you look over the cover. It's a negative photograph of an unknown American penitentiary overgrown with vines with only the title and no attribution to an author. The very last one is Conspiratorial Diabolism, intended as a compilation of both Gates of Moss and the collected theory-fictions of the Satanic Front, an organization I molded in my own image. You set them all down onto the mattress and stand up to stretch your legs.
      That's all I've managed to add to my collection, there's a lot I still have to do and other books I have to collect before it'll all start to click together, I say as your eyes finally meet mine for the first time. I seem tired, only kept awake by stolen coffee. Truthfully, I don't think I'll ever be done, and a lot of what I've chosen to write I started out of a combination of spite and boredom, while I did my best to pretend to be the writer I wish I was. But, it was nice to have someone visit. Sorry I didn't give you much to do.       Finally, you take your leave and exit my door. I lay down on my mattress, content to close my eyes and drift off into the night lands of Shadowside, where the Dark Gods of the Acausal await to deliver their mysteries in my sleep.