At thirteen, Brenley could count the number of times in his life he had left his house on both hands, the number of times he had been over to Nel proper on one, and his trips to Halloween Town on all of two fingers. Even though he could barely recall the visits themselves beyond knowing that they were overwhelming and borderline terrifying, he still placed them on a list of necessary evils, if only because he had come home from each with a new book for his library. Not that all of the books were actually new, far from it, they were simply new to him.

Modern Uses of Foecanthus had been a gift from an old blind demon stationed at the back of a potion shop in the city. She had demanded she feel his face before handing it over, but she had eventually declared him a worthy owner of "the last jackdamned book I could see since it was mostly jackdamned pictures." She didn't seem at all concerned that he was a reaper, a fact that he would only remember as peculiar once he had been out in the world for a while.

Bren obtained Boot Crafting For All Seasons from a barefooted monster who had never even opened it. He paged through its pristine interior every once in a while, but all it really did was reconvince him he never wanted to be a shoemaker.

As it turned out, The Extraction and Maintenance of Minipet Oils was quite informative, though not in the way the author likely intended. It instilled a deep fear of floresce in the young reaper, one that would remain present until he reached Amityville and learned how tiny the fish were in comparison to himself. Before reading it, he hadn't known that minipets even had oils or that there was anything he was meant to be doing with them, but in the end, the tome had proven more helpful than not.

MOLD! A Children's Primer was, frankly, horrifying. He looked at it enough to commit the informative parts to memory, then made sure it was always at the bottom of the pile.

But it was Flynn O'Houlihan: Hero, Sorcerer, Rogue that had been the real find, the book that was by far his favorite of all those he considered truly his. Purchased with newly-hoarded allowance money just last year, it outlined the life and times—or supposed life and times, considering it was a biography—of famed sorcerer Flynn O'Houlihan.

If Flynn was nothing else he was an excellent storyteller, and his tales of daring escapes and courageous adventures fascinated the boil who possessed little in the way of courage or daring. Bren read the book whenever he wasn't expected to be doing anything else, and by the time he'd had the thing six months he had already committed its contents to memory.

His obsession came to a head one day that fall when Brenley learned that Flynn was scheduled to speak at a convention in the nearest largish town. It didn't take much begging for his mother to agree, mostly because she insisted she go with him and he didn't argue. At the time, he didn't suspect she might have been quite the fan of Mr. O'Houlihan herself. They only got a moment with the reaper, but his signed book proved even more important to Bren than the plainer version had ever been.

When he found that first brochure advertising the virtues of Amityville Academy, Brenley put away his books in favor of an old computer, something he assumed would be of greater value to a student. The tomes rested in neat stacks in his darkened closet, waiting for the boil to realize his mistake.