I Bought These Horror Puzzle Books in a Back-Alley Bookstore—Here’s Why You Should Too

I found them in a cramped booth at Crypticon Seattle 2025—no publisher logo, no barcode, just two spiral-bound manuscripts with handwritten price tags: $20 each, cash only. The seller was Mira Grant, the horror writer who gave us Feedback and Deadline, but today she wasn’t peddling novels. She was selling puzzles. Not the kind with jigsaw pieces or crossword grids. These were horror puzzle books: narratives where the only way to survive the story is to solve the clues first. One was a choose-your-own-path graveyard shift where every wrong choice buries you deeper. The other? A murder mystery told entirely in anagrams, where the killer’s name is a scrambled scream. I bought both before I even opened them. By midnight, I was hooked—less like reading, more like being hunted.

The Books

1. The Hollow Code by Evan Purcell

(Self-published, limited print run of 500 — $20 direct from Purcell’s site or at select horror cons) `$8K budget` (printing, art, and a single terrified intern who quit after illustrating the final page) Evan Purcell is the name you whisper in the indie horror circuit when someone mentions “unfilmable” scripts. He wrote The Lullaby Murders (2022), a slasher told through lullabies found on children’s voice recorders—think The Ring if the VHS was a Fisher-Price tape deck. The Hollow Code is his first foray into puzzle books, and it doesn’t play nice. The premise: You’re a night-shift security guard at Blackthorn Asylum, a shuttered psychiatric hospital with a habit of misplacing patients. The last guard vanished three weeks ago. Your job? Patrol eight floors, each a self-contained horror vignette (a séance gone wrong, a doctor dissecting dreams, a patient who only speaks in palindromes). But here’s the catch: every decision you make alters the text. Example: On Floor 4, you find a patient’s journal. One entry reads: > "The doctor says I’m cured. But the walls whisper. Tonight, I’ll—" The last word is missing. Below it, three options:

A) scream
B) listen
C) leave

Choose A)? The next page reveals a police report describing your corpse with a tongue torn out. Choose B)? The whispers rearrange into your name, and suddenly every page you turn includes it—a countdown to possession. Choose C)? Congrats, you just walked into a hallway that wasn’t there before, and now the book is reading you. Purcell’s genius? The puzzles aren’t add-ons; they’re the survival mechanism. Miss a clue, and the book rewrites itself against you. I caught this at Texas Frightmare Weekend 2025 before it had a distributor—the print I saw was still warm from the spiral binder. The artist, Lena Cho, drew every interior spread in ballpoint pen, giving it the feel of a confession scribbled in a panic room. > "I wanted it to feel like a cursed object," Purcell told me over Signal. "Something you’d find in a thrift store, sticky with old coffee and worse."

2. Anagram of the Dead by Mira Grant

(Published by Broken Eye Books, 300-copy limited edition — $25, sold out online but still floating at cons) `$12K budget` (Mira wrote it in a month; the rest went to legal fees for the “Do Not Solve Alone” warning sticker) Mira Grant doesn’t do gentle. Her Parasitology series gave us sentient tapeworms, her Newsflesh books turned bloggers into zombie apocalypse reporters. Anagram of the Dead is her first wordplay horror project, and it rips. The setup: You’re a lexicographer (yes, that’s a real job) hired to authenticate a lost manuscript by Horace Walpole, the guy who wrote The Castle of Otranto. The manuscript? A murder mystery, but with a twist: every line is an anagram. The killer’s identity? A 20-letter scramble. The victim’s last words? A poem where every stanza rearranges into a confession. Example: > "Lure the light, we dare not." Solve it: "A killer under there." Solve that: "Under the lair." Grant’s anagrams aren’t just puzzles—they’re weapons. The deeper you go, the more the text fights back. Miss a clue, and the next page might include a new anagram that wasn’t there before, rewriting the crime in real time. Solve too quickly, and the book accuses you of cheating (yes, really—there’s a page titled "THE CHEATER’S EPITAPH"). > "I wanted the act of solving to feel like poking a corpse," Grant said at her Fantasia 2025 Q&A. "You think you’re in control, but the second you touch it, things start moving on their own." The book’s design mirrors its menace. The cover is embossed with a wax seal that cracks if you flex it too hard. The interior pages are printed on vellum—thin enough to see through, so you can hold one page over another to decode hidden messages.