~post by Steven
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. It has come to the attention of the Nightmare Factory Book Club that a grave threat to the Crown exists, and you are the only qualified parties to stifle this royal menace. As agents of the Nightmare Factory, consider yourselves activated. Go forth! Apprehend and destroy these malefactors before they compromise the BookPeople aristocracy. Use the arcane methods outlined in the forbidden texts. Secrecy and discretion are of the utmost importance. No one may know the motive of your actions, though your deeds themselves will be spoken of in hushed tones into perpetuity. Your identity and greatness will be known only to those who have achieved transcendence through the Ancient and Esoteric Order of the Nightmare Factory. Be brave. Be swift. Be spooky. We shall meet to debrief your holy mission at 8:00 p.m. on Tuesday January 15th in the venerable architecture that houses the BookPeople cafe – designed using Atlantean blueprints by Nicholas Hawksmoor himself – under the guise of discussing From Hell by Alan Moore. If we present ourselves as merely a guild of like-minded aficionados of literary horror fiction, then the public eye will be helplessly diverted from our grand crimes.
From Hell is a history British poverty told through the lens of Jack the Ripper. It is a musing on the nature of storytelling filtered through the antiquity of the fraternal order of Freemasons. Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell have created a beautiful and complex narrative of atrocity from the nebulous and contradictory accounts of the Whitechapel killings of the autumn of 1888. Meticulously researched and feverishly illustrated, From Hell tells a version (one of many) of the Jack the Ripper conspiracy that implicates British royalty, ancient mystical civilizations, numerology, architecture, the perception of time, and even the human brain in the events that arguably spawned the twentieth century. The Nightmare Factory Book Club will meet on Tuesday January 15th at 8:00 p.m. in the BookPeople cafe to discuss the intricacies of this lunatic manifesto disguised as a comic book.
The Nightmare Factory meets on the third Tuesday of every month to talk about gremlins, kobolds, wendigos, and, if Joe gets his way, Dr. Who. It’s a grand (guignol) old time, and we’re always looking for converts, so, if the obelisks align for you this Tuesday, scurry over to the horrid, hoary, hostel that BookPeople calls a cafe at 8:00 p.m. for an hour of supernatural palaver that you won’t live to regret. The only thing we ask of initiates is that they not be time-traveling boogeymen.
BookPeople 