#book excerpt

He liked to shroud himself in a kind of Byronic mystique but was too inherently well-mannered and gentlemanly to be a fully qualified emissary of the 'mad, bad and dangerous to know' brigade. Uninformed people back then talked about Page's occultist dabbling as though the guitarist spent his leisure hours with his head in a cowl ritually slaughtering various species of livestock and then drinking their blood like some corny apparition in a Dennis Wheatley satanic potboiler. This was pure fiction. He was just another seeker after esoteric knowledge, a collector of old dusty books and committed student of the 'magical' information that was supposedly contained within their yellowing pages. And his interests certainly weren't shared by his fellow players, who viewed their guitarist's preoccupations with guarded amusement rather than any sense of trepidation.

Please reblog the polls, but KEEP IT SPOILER-FREE to make people read the excerpt with an open mind 💖📚 Title and author will be revealed after the poll's conclusion.

“Could this be a mountain?” he wondered. “I think I’ve always wanted to climb a mountain.”