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(Please note, this story is fictional. Ideas to make it better are appreciated as I don't usually read horror stories much less write them. It is finished now.)

I am now writing this here because I think the anonymity of the internet is really good for sharing this insane sounding story without freaking out my family and friends. Or getting sent to a therapist. It's about this book a friend of mine gave to me. It was weird. I have a lot of aspiring writer friends and this friend, I'm going to call her Sarah here to keep her identity private, she is a kind person and one of the best writers I know personally. She writes optimistic Christian stories and poems and entered the NaNoWriMo this last year and she was the kind of person who took everything in stride.

Me and my friends swap books as fellow readers do but I hadn't seen Sarah for a long time which annoyed me as she still had my copy of "The Pinhoe Egg" and I needed to return a book of hers. One day as I was doing science homework I heard a knock on my door. It was Sarah but she had that look people get after spending an all nighter studying and seemed a little relieved to see me. "I have a favor to ask you, it's going to sound a little weird, can I come in?" I was going to say, certainly but she didn't wait and came right in so I got out my emergency bag of chocolate and asked what was up. "You have a fireplace at home right? I need you to burn this book when you go home this weekend." I was going to ask if this was a prank but she had a note of desperation in her voice. What I was wondering was what could crack a perfectly sane person's mind so much that they would burn a book? I asked her what was up and she began to tell me an incredibly stupid but eerie story of her past week. This is a approximation from what I could get out of her.

Sarah was at a used book store, a popular one about five minutes walk from campus where we would go for it's good prices and selection of books and she was looking through one of the shelves when a small paperback in the sci-fi section caught her eye. It was one of those cheap little paperbacks with the cheesy illustration and the yellowing pages. You see them in garage sales a lot and this one had a cracked glue binding with the title "Dragon's Banner" and looked like a magic combined with aliens type deal. She figured what the heck and paid ten cents for it along with her other books and went back home.

That night, she picked up the book and began reading. It was badly edited and had a generic cheesy fantasy storyline. There was a heroic knight outcast named Galiel and a lost princess named Kyrea he had to protect from the evil sorcerer Mazorn. Sarah had given up on the book being any good and was going to put it down to read something better but for some reason read it all the way through that Friday evening and finished at about 7:30 AM before sleeping. It was one of those books you couldn't put down because of this driving urge to read the entire book. She didn't tell me much about the story but she did remember the book did get creepy during the last few chapters, something to do with Galiel becoming less heroic and more... sinister and it ended with Galiel betraying Kyrea after Mazorn's defeat. She seemed to not want to go into the details but apparently the images of the story seemed to vivid to her imagination, especially one of Kyrea's death which she would not go into.

That afternoon Sarah threw the book into a recycling bin and promptly forgot about it until that evening when she was going to bed. She decided to read a different book she had bought on Friday and looked in the bag and nearly shrieked when she saw "Dragon's Banner" next to the other books in spite of her utter lack of superstition. Sarah figured she must not have recycled it after all and read a different book that night, "Cry of the Icemark." She says as she read, she couldn't picture what was happening in the book she was reading, she could only picture the characters from "Dragon's Banner" and she swears pieces of text in the book were replaced with paragraphs about Galiel. She says nothing like this had ever happened before to her when reading a book and I believe her. She gave up at about 11 and went to watch a movie in the dorm lobby with friends.
Sarah told me the days between that incident and her coming to me were freaky. She kept seeing the images from the story when she slept and as the week wore on started seeing the characters in dark alleys, in the windows of empty classrooms, and most disturbingly to her she heard the whispers of Kyrea in the girls bathroom.

Sarah finished telling me these things and asked me to keep it secret from other people we know and never to read the book and I promised. Hence the name change and the internet anonymity thing. I know posting this story is a little to close to breaking this for me but I wouldn't even be posting this if it weren't for what has been happening to me.

Suffice to say we talked for some time before Sarah left and I found myself holding the book. (Now duct-taped closed but strangley undamaged despite Sarah telling me she had tried destroying it with scissors.) I put the book on my desk next to my King James Bible before going to bed. My roommate usually comes back late so I didn't bother looking when I heard a shuffle sometime in the night but when I woke up the next morning, "Dragon's Banner" was on the other side of the room, as far away from my desk as it could possibly have been. I was puzzled but I dismissed this and put the book on my shelves. Later I interrogated my roommate even though it was really unlikely that she would have moved it. She said she had never even seen the book and no one besides her had come through our dorm room that night.

After I left the room for dinner, I kept thinking about this whole thing. Was someone playing a sick prank on me? I highly doubted Sarah would have come up with something like this and my roommate seemed to be telling the truth. It was unlikely that someone had been carrying out an elaborate, twisted prank to mess with Sarah then kept it up when it was passed off to me. The yellowing pages of the old paperback smelled odd. Not like an old book, I know what a book smells like. The pages smelled faintly of a bitter scent I could not quite place from any of my experiences.

You should have seen my room. Everything that had been on the shelf with "Dragon's Banner" was now on the floor. It wasn't as if someone had flung stuff off my shelf but the books were neatly stacked in short piles with "Dragon's Banner" being the only book still on the shelf. The picture I had of my family on the shelf was face down on the carpet next to the desk chair and I picked it up. At first I didn't see anything different with the picture but something seemed off. It didn't occur to me what was wrong with it until after I had put books back on the shelf.

Contrabass,

Watch for run-on sentences. In most cases, these can be easily fixed by adding commas.

eg. "Me and my friends swap books as fellow readers do but I hadn't seen Sarah for a long time which annoyed me as she still had my copy of "The Pinhoe Egg" and I needed to return a book of hers."


Also, consider adding quotation marks or italicizing thoughts for clarity. In the case below, moving the comma will fix the issue.

eg. "I was going to say, certainly but she didn't wait and came right in[...]"


Watch your possessives (two to fix here): "a popular one about five minutes walk from campus where we would go for it's good prices"


As a style note (only in American or English), some adjectives have precedence over others when using several to describe the same noun. A different order will change the meaning enough to matter.

eg. "There was a heroic knight outcast named Galiel"


Additionally, remember that subordinate clauses need to be separated from independent clauses with commas.

eg."Sarah had given up on the book being any good and was going to put it down to read something better but for some reason read it all the way through that Friday evening and finished at about 7:30 AM before sleeping."


Be wary as to what your verbs are being modified by, particularly in complex sentences.

eg. and nearly shrieked when she saw "Dragon's Banner" next to the other books in spite of her utter lack of superstition.


All of your transitions between paragraphs have been good, except for this one:

"The pages smelled faintly of a bitter scent I could not quite place from any of my experiences.

You should have seen my room."


In all, I enjoyed this. The ending was a little unsatisfying, though - I recommend removing your last single-sentence paragraph, and instead ending with the last full paragraph.

Errors within the piece were related mostly to commas, but more specifically, a lack of enough of them. I suggest filling a pepper grinder with semi-colons, then just cracking them all over the piece.