OK, this will sound weird, but it’s not that weird.
Well, maybe a bit. You judge for yourself.
For Easter, I got a gift – a well thumbed second hand copy of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Wicca and Witchcraft.
See?
Told you it would sound weird.
I mean, it’s Easter!
Witchcraft? Wicca?
C’mon!

But the thing does make a weird sort of sense:

as I mentioned, I’ve been planning to write something about occult detectives and ghosts for a while now, and I’m slowly doing research. And I have a lot of books about mysteries and old Egyptian magic and all the rest, but with research, documentation is never enough, right?
And so, my brother decided I needed a book about current magical practices, and witchcraft and all the rest.

The Complete Idiot’s books are a fine primer – not the books I would use as my only reference, but certainly a good one-stop resource to get some color information for a short story or two.

This one is… well, it’s weird.
The fact that it comes with scrawls and annotations on its margins and underscored paragraphs only makes it more suggestive¹.
That’s one of the good things about second hand books – they come with a life of their own.
And in this case, it is a mysterious, vaguely disquieting life.
The book itself is, in a way, a good inspiration for a short story.

Granted, we are a million miles away from Easter eggs and fluffy bunnies.
But considering another Easter present was a thick collection of ghost stories, I do feel like I was suddenly time-shifted to Halloween.