An Unearthly Bookshop

[bunn]

We went to Bere Alston today, in search of a second hand bookshop.   Bere Alston is a large village in the middle of the Bere Peninsula, which is an oddity in that it is a sort of fully-retracted peninsula in the middle of a land mass.  It is separated from Cornwall and the rest of Devon by rivers that bend round to make it almost an island.   So

Comments

[ladyofastolat]

According to the internet (and they do exist there, and sell via loads of different online booky places), it's a bookshop that specialises in "Occult, Psychology." Therefore they were probably observing you, either to study your reaction ("Hmmm," they were going, "interesting!" and scrawling down little notes) or to see if you were suitable for their mystic, arcane purposes. You were wise to escape when you did.

[huinare]

They were probably sitting and observing at the filthy computer the whole time...invisible to the unaided human eye.

(Just to make Bunn and Pp feel even more comforted about the whole affair! =D)

[bunn]

YES. THIS.

[bunn]

Apparently Pp *knew* it was an Occult bookshop, although he only admitted this afterwards!

None of the books I looked at *seemed* Occult - they were mostly history, local and international - there was quite a nice edition of Gibbon's Decline and Fall - and lots of ancient disintegrating guidebooks. Oh, and a book by Giles Brandreth, according to Pp, and one short story by Philip K Dick. But Pp reckons that he found some Occult stuff on one of the shelves in the Very Dark section of the shop, which I did not dare to venture into.

[ladyofastolat]

Oh! This sounds like an excellent place for a Butteller excursion, albeit one that sounds even more dangerous than last year's Gorge of DEATH! The invisible watchers were presumably hivers, and somewhere hidden on the shelves was the Necronomicon itself. I think our characters need to a make an urgent return to the West Country to check it out.

(Edited on the grounds that it is probably unwise the misspell the name of a such a dangerous book.)

[bunn]

I'm a bit scared about this idea. If we do it, I am staying near the door. And I may wear running shoes.

[philmophlegm]

On the subject of Lovecraft...

There is a Lovecraft short story called 'The Shadow over Innsmouth' in which the protagonist arrives in the New England coastal village of the title to find that the village is shunned by people from the surrounding settlements. He discovers [SPOILERS] that the inhabitants have all interbred with Deep Ones.

That was very much the vibe I got from Bere Alston. I could well believe that the inhabitants of Bere Alston are not so much interbred as inbred...

[wellinghall]

I recommend "Book Wurms", by Andy West, in Fables from the Fountain.

[carmarthen]

This sounds like perfect short story fodder. O_o

[bunn]

My mother, intrigued by my description of the place, has decided she will visit. (My mother is strangely attracted by terrible retail experiences, I think it's the train-wreck quality :-D)

We speculate that if she arrives and finds a perfectly normal well illuminated second-hand bookshop staffed by a visible human being this will be proof that the Unearthly Bookshop is actually migratory, and appears only at certain phases of the moon.

[ext_3642617]

We encountered this place too while passing through and getting some food from the supermarket across the way, however more unsettling was the unkempt middle aged chap wearing a Pokemon T-Shirt sitting at the computer, which compelled my mate to say "ere, come and have a look at this". I went over, but the guy had vanished. The shop had an open sign, but was in disarray, and in the window were loads of hand drawn pictures of questionable quality and weird slightly disturbing content. The sign on the door was turned around to "open" but like hell were we going to go in there, we were sleeping in a camper that night in the fog up on the moors, needless to say it felt like we had unwittingly stumbled into a horror movie, so wheel braces were kept close to hand. We were pleasantly surprised to wake up alive the following morning.