A Devilish Review of Recent Reading

La prière d'une vierge. Auguste Jean Baptiste Roubille, 1899. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons. A weird little book found me this week, thanks to a little free library. I’d never heard of Catalan author Irene Solà, but seeing that Graywolf was the publisher of her I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness, I grabbed the novel and took it home. The thing was, it was stuffed with sheets of paper larger than the paperback itself. Most were copies of individual pages of another book; a few were what seemed like teen scrapbooking paper, transparent not-quite cardstock with pastel-y images of blonde lovers and mysterious scripts. A quick search of some of the phrases on the photocopied pages revealed that they came from Necronomicon: The Anunnaki Bible, a work I’m guessing engages in what Gabriel McKee calls “the misappropriation of ancient texts.”1 At some point, I tried to determine whether the combination of pages and teen romance images had been inserted with any system,…