There is a silence that only exists in a book room at night.

Not a room with books in it. A real book room. The kind with old paper, leather, dust, foxing, dead insects in the window tracks, and shelves that seem perfectly innocent until you are alone with them after dark. I am an antiquarian bookseller. My book barn smells like pine, vanilla, mildew, cardboard, and the slow surrender of paper and leather to time.

One night I was out there picking books for orders, doing the ordinary work of the trade, when I had one of those thoughts that can only arrive in the dark.

What if something was trapped in one of the books?

Not a ghost. Not a cursed object in the movie-prop sense. Something older and stranger. A consciousness folded into the words the way a pressed flower is folded into a page, except the flower remembers being alive and is furious about it.

That was the first seed of this novel.

The second seed was worse, because it was real. I have, in my possession, a book I still have not opened. It is stitched shut. Not tied. Not politely fastened. Stitched. Someone took thread and sealed the thing closed with the sort of determination that suggests they did not want anyone looking inside. It is also hollowed out, and from what I can see, which is already more than I want to see, it appears to contain some kind of spellwork. I am not claiming expertise. I am saying that every instinct I possess as a dealer of old and strange things says: do not open that book.

I have handled Santería grimoires, moldering family Bibles, Victorian mourning books, handwritten journals, medical texts with illustrations that should have been illegal, and the sort of occult-adjacent volumes that make sensible people ask why anyone kept them in the house. Most of them are just books. Strange books, beautiful books, disturbing books, but books. This one feels like a door with bad manners. I am not the woman in the horror movie who hears scratching from the basement and goes down to check it out. I am the woman who bricks up the basement and sells the house.

I wrote a character who is a lot like me.

Nasreen Khalil is not me, exactly, but let's not insult anyone's intelligence. She is an antiquarian book dealer. So am I. She knows what old books smell like. So do I. She understands that manuscripts are physical things before they are intellectual things: leather, thread, glue, ink, rot, pressure, weather, hands. She knows that books have bodies. I also trained with a Wing Chun sifu for several years, so that part did not come from nowhere either. Nasreen is younger, better with languages, and fictional, which gives her certain advantages. But if we are being honest, I am probably more likely to punch someone in a hallway.

This novel sat half-finished for a long time. Writers know that particular guilt, the manuscript on the hard drive, clearing its throat, accusing you quietly every time you open the folder and close it again. I had around fifty thousand words. I loved the story. I told myself there would be time.

Then 2025 happened.

My father died. He was the person who gave me my love of books, reading, impossible things, magic, mythology, and the sense that the world is stranger than it looks if you know how to pay attention. Losing him made life feel very short, because it is very short. It made unfinished things feel less like harmless clutter and more like a warning.

Then the Fire Horse year arrived (2026), and something in me turned hard and bright. I did not want another year of almost. Almost finished. Almost brave enough. Almost ready.

So I went back to Colophon and finished it.

A word about the title, for those who are not yet afflicted with the disease of book history. A colophon is the note you sometimes find at the end of an old manuscript, the scribe's last mark before the covers close. It might record who copied the text, where it was made, when it was finished. Sometimes they are dry. Sometimes they are startlingly personal. A scribe might complain about his cramping hand, ask God to bless the reader, or quietly insert an epithet into history after hundreds of pages of copying someone else's words.

I love colophons because they remind us that books do not fall from heaven. Someone made them. Someone sharpened the pen, mixed the ink, stitched the gatherings, corrected the errors, cursed the work, finished the thing, and left one last human fingerprint at the end.

This novel contains explicit sexual content, supernatural horror, themes of confinement and consent, references to past domestic violence, and enough Arabic linguistic analysis to send you down a three-hour etymology rabbit hole. Proceed accordingly.

The door is unlocked. Mind the shadows.

— Narcisse