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For some authors, it's not enough to create a great character. They have to take it to the next level allow their creations to hop the border from book to book. These easter eggs fill us with uncontainable excitement. There’s nothing like discovering a beloved character in a totally unrelated novel. The result is an intricate web we are more-than-thrilled to dissect.

We’ve rounded up a handful of author magicians who love to revive their characters in totally new books. We can’t blame them for not wanting to let them go.

Take your summer reading to darker territories with the following titles, now 60% off on Nook until 8/10/2015!

HORROSTÖR 
 THE LAST POLICEMAN
THE RESURRECTIONIST
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES

CAMP PLOT-A-WANNA is a weekly 8-part series where Quirk Books staffers reimagine famous authors as pre-teens, stuck together at summer camp. Check out the rest of the posts here. It is also an entirely fictional place. Please don't have your parents drop you off at our offices with sleeping bags.

Memo

To: Camp Plot-a-Wanna senior counselors
From: Camp Counselor Bill Shakespeare

At last night’s weenie and marshmallow roast, camper H. Lovecraft (Underwood Cabin) suggested the group tell scary stories around the campfire. He offered to begin a story, which the other campers could then add to. Things didn’t go exactly as planned. Here’s a transcript:

Horrostör by Grady Hendrix: $3.99!

Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Kobo / iBookstore

Something strange is happening at the Orsk furniture superstore in Columbus, Ohio.

When I was a kid, I read A Wizard of Earthsea, and I read The Hobbit, and I read The Great Brain, and The Saturdays, and From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, and I read Judy Blume, and I read pretty much everything I could get my hands on, from Choose Your Own Adventure to the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom novelization, but there is only one book that I look back and am truly thankful for. It’s the book that saved me, the book that made me who I am today, the book that turned me into a writer. It is, of course, Famous Monsters of Filmland’s Star Wars Spectacular.

In most honest form, I recall to you an academic list, which I have fastidiously discovered through Plutonian nightmares that have defiled my fleeting knowledge of the earthly truths I once knew, of the six scariest words I have accounted in my life. Few have endured this maldictonox that was borne to pass under my visage.

Sepulcher

I wake up in a graveyard. This sometimes happens. I spy an abstruse structure through the curtain of fog, and I come upon Your Humble Narrator's first abominable word.

A sepulcher is an innocent childhood-ghost-story word that we probably know well from Edgar Allen Bro's "Annabel Lee." If you're not familiar with the word (or you don't have a familiar spirit that follows you, unlike me), a sepulcher is a room intended for a dead body to lie in for a vast amount of time. 

Homes for the dead are generally odd to consider (despite our fascination with burials). However, if someone offers a sepulcher for rent on Craigslist, I'll probably take it pro-rated from the cadaver-in-residence. Just have to worry about that whole eternal lease thing.

Eviscerate

Adversely, this is a word I do NOT like to see in Craigslist posts.

With its provided, lighthearted connotation, my pocket Oxford Dictionary, dampened and moldy, defines eviscerate as "[depriving] something of its essential contents." 

By essential contents, we actually mean internal organs, right?

Correct.

Even grimmer is Oxford's own lovely example: "[T]he goat had been skinned and neatly eviscerated." 

At least the goat was disemboweled in a neat fashion. That's always good. 

In a rare and spectral jitter, I drop the pocket Oxford into a river of screaming souls (?) and wander to find a train to take to get to the goat sacrifice.

I didn't mention the goat sacrifice before?

Well now I'm mentioning it.

Truncheon

En route to the train, I become lost on a stone road in a sprawling forest (Hell's Kitchen, go figure). The sun taunts me: it's nearly dark, but not quite. The crimson dusk draws to its apex on the tree line, curdled blood—when a bear jumps out with a truncheon in its right paw. More terrifying than the bear is the truncheon.

What the heck is a truncheon? It sounds awful.

That's because it is. It's quite awful. It's a baton meant to cause blunt damage to an intended victim. One might simply call it a baton, or a billy club, but if a bear wants you utterly under its terror-spell, it will say, "This is my truncheon. There are many like it, but this one is mine."

Arachnivorous

I rush to a local deli and ask for a quarter pound of headcheese. It's that time of year, right? As I wait for my order, I see a shifty character in the corner with a paper bag in his hands.

"What've you got there?" I ask, somehow immune to the day's happenings.

"My darlings," he says, grinning.

Two things happen in that moment:

One, I see that this guy has a beautiful smile.

Two, I see that there are dozens of black legs wriggling between his teeth.

This man is arachnivorous. He eats spiders. He eats spiders.

He eats spiders.

Onychotillomania

While watching this man kill his darlings (HA!), my own neuroses take over and I begin to compulsively pick at my fingernails. That's because I'm an onychotillomaniac. I swear, it's not the fascination with the broken nails…or the tearing cuticles…or the fear of an impending truncheon-bear hallucination—just my craze and interaction with the penultimate word on this list.

Later IN THE night—

I arrive at the goat sacrifice with my familiar spirit, daydreaming about my new sepulcher pad. Monks of darker arts emerge from behind the groaning oaks (with truncheons?!) and a nice little goat is led to the altar. I pick at my hanging pinky nail. I slap a spider on my neck and accidentally snack on it. 

Then the ritual begins. Something seems odd when one of the unholy acolytes begins chanting about tax season. Then two more start chanting. Then four. Then all 17. They pull down their habits to reveal their white dress shirts, their 1099's, their tax return transcripts—

Could it be? Could all of the outerdimensional prophecies have come to fiscal fruition in his hellish manifest of utter demonology? 

Before my realization suffocates my sanity, a banner unfurls from the altar, hosting what I believe to be the scariest word of all:

AUDIT.

The archmonk of taxation lay the goat on the altar. The others continue to chant.

AUDIT.

He asks about the goat's personal expenses. Then the goat's at-home office expenses.

AUDIT.

Then about any back taxes the goat might like to disclose. It bleats in panic.

AUDIT.

The fiduciary horror! I fall to the ground in numbing awe. In my last moments of consciousness, the quadruped victim bleats in rhythm with the umbrage of the demoniacal tax monks, suffering a fury of withheld employee tax deposit penalties.

I wake hours later, the acolytes having disappeared from the desecrated woods. I happen to view a large spider crawling from me, snickering, having picked through my pockets and pulling out my iPhone 6. My mind already ensnared, I give no attention to the Apple-hip spider but instead wonder if I had properly filled out my W-2.

Ah! what abysmal aberrations I have suffered to view in this world!

—

Alex Grover (@AlexPGrover) writes in New York. He sometimes ventures to the gates of delirium, mistaking The Cranberries lyrics for Lovecraftian lore.