History Main / TomeOfEldritchLore

* ''{{Exalted}}'' has numerous examples, but the most infamous might be ''The Broken-Winged Crane''. How bad is it? It isn't even ''written'' yet; all the copies that exist are reverse engineered from the perfect version that comes into existence the day the world ends.[[hottip:*:It should be noted that time travel is explicitly impossible in the ''Exalted'' setting. This has not stopped the imperfect copies from appearing well before the book is written.]] And seeing as the only canon character to have read the book is implied to have been abducted and {{mind rape}}d by archdemons, there's a very good chance the book ''causes'' it.

** A lot of Scientology is filled with this same principle. Take for example, the infamous Xenu story[[hottip:*:75,000,000 years ago, Xenu was the head of a Galactic Confederation of Planets. The confederation suffered from overpopulation, so he abducted large numbers of beings, froze them, and flew them to Earth, where he arranged them around the bases of volcanoes and blew them up with hydrogen bombs. He then captured the thetans (souls) of these beings and brainwashed them with images of all the religious imagery that exists today, including the entire story of Christ. Upon release, these thetans clumped together and attached themselves to our ancestors, and through various incarnations they remain attached to us today.]]; if you try to cure yourself of its effects, it's supposed to trigger a sudden, fatal onset of pneumonia.

** Another book, the Light Prognosticus, was written later. Unlike its darker cousin, this one predicts Mario & Co. stopping the end of everything. [[SarcasmMode Which totally doesn't make the game's "prophecies are meaningless" aesop]] [[BrokenAesop broken]].
*** It's worth noting that the Light Prognosticus is not actually prophetic, but instead outlines a series of steps that its author believed necessary to stop the Dark Prognosticus's prophecies from coming to pass.
*** The {{Aesop}} is really not broken at all. You have two prophecies (Light and Dark) that are fundamentally at odds with one another; which one wins out comes down to a matter of wills. In other words, the prophecies are self-fulfilling. That was really the point the game was trying to make.

* TheSimpsons parodied it. In the first Tree House of Horror, one segment features an adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe's the Raven. When the line about reading the quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore comes around, we find Homer reading a book titled "Forgotten Lore, Volume III"
** In another [[TheSimpsons Simpsons]], Lisa is cleaning out the garage and finds a thick leather bound book. She begins to read the Latin and behind her, a demon begins to form. However the horror is foiled when she tosses the book aside in favor of Mad Libs.

* During the trial episode of season one of WesternAnimation/TheVentureBrothers, Dr. Orpheus asks the bailiff to swear him in with his own book. A book that bears a suspicious resemblance to the Necronomicon. As the book snarls at the bailiff, Dr. Orpheus warns: "Careful, he's a nibbler!"

* Titanium Chef from ''SushiPack'' uses recipes from "The Book of Chum Chop: Ancient Recipes for Chaos and Mayhem" to perpetrate his villainy. This includes creating perfect (but emotionless) dopplegangers, opening a warp to a [[MirrorUniverse parallel universe]], and cooking up a batch of shoeshine that makes anyone who uses it feel cold even though they're not ([[ItMakesSenseInContext It Was Evil In Context]]).
* The first CareBears movie has a book that might have been considered an plain old SpellBook, were it not for the fact that it [[SealedEvilInACan also contains]] the ''[[NightmareFuel head of an malevolent spirit]]'' that coaxes its owner to cast more and more evil spells.
* Kyle, a 12 year old boy wizard from ''FanboyAndChumChum'', wields the Necronomicon.
* Subverted in an ''WesternAnimation/EarthwormJim'' episode "The Book of Doom," in which the "most evil book in the universe" is revealed to be Fuzzy Wuzzy's Funny Animal Pop-Up Book. Doubly subverted in that a few copies turned out to have accidentally been printed with a page explaining how to destroy the universe, just after the pudgy-wudgy hippo.
* WesternAnimation/HeManAndTheMastersOfTheUniverse and WesternAnimation/SheRaPrincessOfPower had a few of these, including a spellbook that would summon Daimar the Demon, in the He-man episode ''Daimar The Demon'', and the Ancients' Book of Spells in ''A Bird In The Hand''. In the She-ra series, Shadow Weaver got ahold of the Eldritch Book of Spells in ''The Eldritch Mist''. Then Madam Razz had to locate the Nameless Glowing Book to find a spell to get She-ra out of the Sixth Dimension in ''Three Courageous Hearts''.

* The vampire novel, ''TheHistorian'' has one of these which has the effect of attracting Vlad Dracula and his minions to those who find a copy. This is made creeper by the fact that the novel actually looks like the Tome of Eldritch Lore described within.

* Grimoires in ''ToAruMajutsuNoIndex'' seem to be this, considering that they allow the user to gain ''tremendous'' power, but the results range from (so far) BloodFromTheMouth at best and BodyHorror at worst. Only the eponymous Index of Prohibited Books has been able to read the grimoires and [[PhotographicMemory store them in her head]], since she has no mana to power the grimoires.
* Caster's Noble Phantasm in ''FateZero'' is Prelati's Spellbook, a tome with a covering made of human skin. It's a self-powering prana generator and allows the user to summon {{Eldritch Abomination}}s. It's also called the R'lyeh text, as a ShoutOut to the CthulhuMythos. It can also allow Caster to [[spoiler:[[FusionDance merge with the book]] in order to summon a gigantic EldritchAbomination]]. Is it any wonder that Caster is so absolutely insane?
* The Book of Darkness in ''MagicalGirlLyricalNanohaAs''. To power it up, you have to collect the magic power of other people and creatures; if you decline to, it will drain your power instead, slowly killing you. And when all its pages (naturally, there are [[NumberOfTheBeast six hundred and sixty-six]] of them) are filled, do you think you can wield its power? You're as good as dead, and so is the planet you are on. (The tragedy is that it wasn't originally that way - it has been corrupted by people who wanted to use it as a weapon.)
* The Claire Bible in TheSlayers. Its author is benign enough (one of the good dragon-gods of the Slayers world), but its subject is the Mazoku race and the dragons' war with them, with extra details on the Mazoku-powered black magic and the secret magic of the supreme creator deity. The genuine Claire Bible is also not a book, but a sphere holding infinite knowledge, however many fragments of it are indeed scribed as books and scrolls.

* TheSimpsons parodied it. In the first Tree House of Horror, one segment features an adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe's the Raven. When the line about reading the quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore comes around, we find Home reading a book titled "Forgotten Lore, Volume III"

*** One of the weird things about it is that in the MU, vampirism started when a group of Atlantean sorcerers slew their enemies, but weren't satisfied with simply winning the fight and killing their foes. They wanted to make them suffer after death, so they used a spell from the Darkhold to raise them as the first vampires. Predictably things after that did not go 'quite' as the sorcerers intended.

* In the HarryPotter fic ''Inter Vivos'', Draco's mother gave him a book that contained "a great deal of Dark Arts knowledge—spells, but also rituals, potions, and many other things, willed into the book by its possessors". When asked a question, it would shift into a book about whatever the subject might be - provided you asked it the ''right'' questions.

* ''HarryPotter'' has passing references to these, but they are apparently so common in the wizarding world that the only precautions taken with them is putting them in the restricted section of the school library, rather than the main section. Even though an example of one of these books ''screams'' when it is opened [[YouDoNotWantToKnow for some unfathomable reason...]]

* ''TabletopGame/WerewolfTheApocalypse'' has the Chronicle of the Black Labyrinth which was written by an [[DepartmentofRedundancyDepartment insane Black Spiral Dancer Kinfolk]] describing the lore of the Wyrm. Reading it slowly corrupts the reader to the power of the Wyrm.

The books (''Discworld/EqualRites'' in particular) even recount an unfortunate case of a mage who tried to read the Necrotelecomnicon, and as a result he was never seen again, and the book became several pages thicker... ([[InSovietRussiaTropeMocksYou On Discworld, Necrotelecomnicon reads you!]])\\

* The plot of the movie ''TheNinthGate'' (based on ''Literature/TheClubDumas'', above) revolves around a book called ''The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows''. In the movie it was an adaptation of an earlier work supposedly written by the Devil himself and contained clues on how to summon him in person.

* The plot of the movie ''TheNinthGate'' (based on ''The Club Dumas'', above) revolves around a book called ''The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows''. In the movie it was an adaptation of an earlier work supposedly written by the Devil himself and contained clues on how to summon him in person.

* The book ''The Club Dumas'' by Arturo Pérez-Reverté reproduces the nine illustrations that provide the clues to invoke the devil in the tome of eldritch lore (''De Umbrarum Regni Novem Portis'' -- everything occult [[EverythingSoundsSexierInFrench sounds better in Latin]]), repeated each time the protagonist finds one of the three surviving copies of the ''Novem Portis'', as each one has a subtly different set of illustrations. There is a TwistEnding that hinges on these differences. It is little surprising that these illustrations are supposedly reprinted from the fabled ''Delomelanicon, or Invocation of Darkness''.

** And there are more horrific versions of this trope in the PotterVerse. ''The Monster Book [[DepartmentOfRedundancyDepartment of Monsters]]'' actually tries to ''bite its readers''. There's the ones Ron warns Harry about: ones that burn people's eyes out, ones that make them speak in limericks for the rest of their lives, or ones that the reader [[NightmareFuel can never, ever stop reading]]. There's also homemade ones, like the graffitied copy of ''Advanced Potion-Making''. However, those are paltry compared to [[LivingMemory Tom]] [[DemonicPossession Riddle's]] [[SoulJar diary]].

** ''De Vermis Mysteriis'' has an important role in Creator/StephenKing's short story ''Jerusalem's Lot'', a homage to Lovecraft. ''Necronomicon'' briefly appears in another short story, ''I Know What You Need''.

* ''TheCatcherInTheRye''. Most famously found in the possession of Mark David Chapman, the man who assassinated JohnLennon who claimed inspiration for the act came from the book. The book has been further linked to other famous murderers and assassins. Conspiracy theorists have claimed that the book is somehow used by shadowy government forces as a trigger for sleeper assassins like in ''TheManchurianCandidate'', something touched upon in several movies such as the MelGibson thriller ''Conspiracy Theory''.