References in the title:
The stories that the Canterlot Five jump into, in order:
- Slaughterhouse-Five
- Moby-Dick
- Though when Moondancer scouts ahead, the excerpts she reads are from Frankenstein.
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
- The Hobbit
- If on a winter’s night a traveler
- And then the version of If on a winter's night a traveler inside that very book.
- "The Library of Babel"
- Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto.
- The Man Who Was Thursday
- The Vonyich Manuscript
- Frankenstein, for real this time.
- "Jack and the Beanstalk"
- The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
- With plenty of quotes from the Iron Maiden song inspired by the poem.
- And with leftover bits from Moby-Dick mashed into it.
- The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
- Dune (in the bonus chapter)
Other shout-outs:
- The cover art is an edit of a The Perry Bible Fellowship strip.
- "And Lyra was there, too," is a reference to "Bob was there, too," from Casey and Andy.
- The Gimel and its powers come from Unwinder's Tall Comics—from a story arc that's an Affectionate Parody of Jorge Luis Borges' story "The Aleph".
- "What if we’d gotten lost in something like House of Sheaves?"
- Gullfaxi takes the place of the giant in this version of "Jack and the Beanstalk".
- Apple Bloom's song at the end is "To Tame a Land", which is about Dune.