Item Seed: Suspicious Minds: Superstitions and American Counterculture During the Cold War.

Suspicious Minds: Superstitions and American Counterculture During the Cold War

Description: 300 pages long, softbound cover.  No cover photo. Published in 2017 by Routledge Publishing. DO NOT READ CONTENTS.

They stopped the print run and tried to get every review copy that they could find, of course.  In at least five cases, the copies had to be taken from the still-cooling corpses of their owners (average death toll for those encounters: 5.4 people).  Alas, at least twenty copies of Suspicious Minds: Superstitions and American Counterculture During the Cold War remain unaccounted for, and there’s some indication that at least portions of the book have since been reproduced by occultists with more thirst for power than the sense God gave a goose.

Why the heavy-handed response? Because Suspicious Minds is a damnable Forbidden Tome, of course.  And it seems to be fated to be this cultural period’s contribution to the field of “books filled with Things Man Was Not Meant To Know.”  Not that the author (Jacqulyn Finster, PhD: taught folklore at the University of San Diego, right up to the point where she spontaneously combusted while scuba diving in Hawaii) apparently intended that; but then, probably Abdul Alhazred probably didn’t intend to have the Necronomicon take off the way it did, either.  Fact remains that it did, and while Suspicious Minds isn’t as likely to be bad it’s still pretty bad, OK?

So, what does reading Suspicious Minds do?  The usual: delusions of grandeur, imposing a light-hearted attitude towards killing worms denying your greatness, the ability to snap people’s bones without touching them, wholesale probability alteration techniques, and so forth.  Nobody’s been able to read a review copy yet and still keep it together, although oddly the original manuscript for Suspicious Minds doesn’t seem to cause the same reaction.  It’s just the finished product — or, more accurately, the almost finished product.  Research is not continuing. Research, in fact, has been tabled for at least 200 years.  That’s apparently how long it takes for new Forbidden Tomes to lose enough of their initial negative charge to be maybe safe enough to really look at.

So, until then: BURN THE BOOK.  The right people already have all the copies we need.  Put in a box, which was then sealed, and dropped in a concrete foundation.  Just to remove temptation, you understand.