In the quiet town of Drelmere, where the fog rarely lifted and the clocks ticked a fraction too slow, there existed a bookshop that no one remembered entering. Its name, carved into aged oak and barely visible beneath layers of soot and rain, simply read: “The Book of Strange.”
People claimed it hadn’t always been there. That it appeared one night during a thunderstorm that had left no damage but stole all the birds. The shop had no listed hours, no shopkeeper, and the door never locked — not that anyone truly recalled stepping inside.
And yet, the shop existed. You could walk past it. You could see the spines of old books flickering in candlelight. Sometimes, when you passed at just the right moment, you heard a whisper: not to you — just nearby. Like a thought you hadn’t thought yet.
Elinor Grey, a historian of lost texts and forgotten towns, arrived in Drelmere on a hunch, following a trail of unindexed footnotes and handwritten references to a “volume that reads you back.” She’d heard the legends. A book that didn’t tell you stories, but rewrote your memory. Rewrote you.
Her first night in town, she dreamed of pages turning themselves. Of ink crawling like ants. Of names she didn’t recognize but woke up mouthing.
On the second day, she saw it — the shop. Nestled between a defunct bakery and a boarded-up apothecary. She stepped inside, though she wouldn’t remember doing so.
The air was warm with the smell of old leather and something wet, like the underside of a stone. Shelves stretched far beyond what the outside dimensions allowed. Books hummed softly, some blinking with moving type.
In the center of the room, on a pedestal of bleached bone, rested a single volume. Its cover was neither paper nor leather, but some kind of shifting material that reflected Elinor’s face in wrong ways — her eyes too many, her smile folding backward.
It was titled, plainly:
“The Book of Strange.”
She touched it. Of course she did. And the book opened.
Not to the first page. To her page.
The text had no font she recognized — it seemed to adjust itself to her thoughts. It began describing her life, not just the known but the hidden: her guilt over her brother’s disappearance at the lake when they were children. Her belief that she’d seen something impossible beneath the water — a hand of ink and stars pulling him under.
She turned the page. It described today, down to her breakfast. She turned again.
And read tomorrow.
The entry ended with a line she couldn’t understand: “The birds return through you.”
Then, a sudden pain — a feathered scream inside her skull — and the book snapped shut.
When she looked up, the shop was empty. Not just of books, but of shelves. Of walls.
She was standing in the forest outside Drelmere, barefoot. Mud on her hands. The book gone.
Back in town, things were different. People didn’t recognize her, though she still wore her own face. The buildings were wrong — older. The street lamps burned with fire, not electricity.
And the sky — it was too close, like it was being lowered with invisible ropes.
Children walked backward. Dogs spoke in riddles when no one else was around. And in every reflective surface, Elinor saw birds flying, trapped behind the glass.
She found a mirror in an abandoned house. Wrote a question on it in ash:
“What am I?”
The answer formed not as letters, but as an image: herself, holding The Book of Strange, eyes black with wings fluttering inside.
Years passed. Or days. Or no time at all.
She became the shopkeeper.
The shop is not always in Drelmere now. It appears where it’s needed. Where someone is about to remember something they’ve forgotten on purpose. Where the boundary between fiction and self is weakest.
The book still sits on the pedestal of bone. Still writes in real time.
You don’t find the shop. It finds you, when your story has grown too small to contain the truth.
And when you leave — if you leave — you won’t be as you were.
Because you will have read The Book of Strange.
And it will have written you back.
Do you remember how you got here?
Thank-you for reading.
Remember there are many paths back to God.
Follow your own path,
Brenda Marie
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This is a wonderfully atmospheric and unsettling piece. It masterfully blends the eerie stillness of a forgotten town with the profound, personal horror of identity being rewritten. The idea of a book that doesn’t just tell a story but actively reconstructs the reader is both haunting and brilliant. It lingers with a chilling question about memory, self, and the stories we choose—or are forced—to forget.