Why do we all love books about secret, hidden or forgotten texts?

It’s certainly a major element of my own writing — secret texts play prominently in The Dead Hamlets (a haunted manuscript of Hamlet), The Apocalypse Ark (God’s lost bible) and The Wonder Lands War (magical Wonderland books that spawn strange creatures), as well as a number of my Azrael the Angel Gunslinger tales.

But I’m not the only writer fixated on such things. When I look at my bookshelves, it seems half my reading is also concerned with the topic. So why are we all so obsessed with secret texts?

There are a few reasons that immediately come to mind. Secret texts can often show us the truth of the world and make sense of its chaotic, unpredictable or even incomprehensible nature. They offer an x-ray of our world or turn it inside out, particularly when combined with elements of the horror genre. HP Lovecraft is perhaps the most obvious example of this, with his frequent uses of mythical, forbidden texts that reveal humanity’s true insignificance in the cosmos and the monstrous forces that actually shape the universe. Nobody said the hidden truth of the world had to be pleasant. In fact, that’s often why the books are hidden away: to protect the rest of us from going mad when we realize the truth.

A more contemporary version of this is Jonathan L. Howard’s Carter and Lovecraft series, which features the cop-turned-PI Carter inheriting a bookstore run by a descendant of HP Lovecraft. The unlikely duo stumble into a supernatural plot that reveals Lovecraft was writing about real cosmic horrors and his books were portals to other realms, or to simple impossibilities in our meagre understanding of the cosmos.

Secret books are also often about power. Books are knowledge, after all, and knowledge is power. Some books are hidden away not to protect humanity but to protect those with the power. Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose is an intriguing example of this, where a mad monk in a labyrinthian library carries out a series of murders to stop knowledge of the lost comedies of Aristotle to escape. It’s a delightfully literary murder mystery, but it’s also a tale of the attempted suppression of free speech by those who want to maintain their power and not share it with the world. The ones with the access to the secret books get the power while everyone else is denied it.

More modern readers may see a similar dynamic at work in RF Kuang’s Babel, which has more than a few similarities to Eco’s work. In Babel specially trained scholars work magic by exploiting the gaps in meaning that occur in translations, with the tension between different meanings of words conjuring a sort of magical energy that can be used for nearly every purpose that has a word assigned to it.

Finally, forgotten texts can be about forgotten — or suppressed — knowledge. In Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, for instance, characters are often confronted with texts or mythic structures created by men and they must reimagine them from a different perspective to survive. Indeed, the stories of The Bloody Chamber are themselves reimaginings of patriarchal tales, told in ways that give the female characters more agency and power.

One way or another, secret books seem to be about revealing secret truths, to understand the world in a new light. And isn’t that why we all read in the first place?

(This post was inspired by the Whispers from the Archives panel at the WCSFA CONnections convention, where I was a participant.)