Bigoted Book Burners Bloodily Bludgeoned by Badly Burnt Books

By Caledonia Fife

Loxwick is a normal English town full of normal English people who want normal English things... like Zosime, a normal trans teenager. She simply wants to live her life, help her best friend, Amethyst, with Amethyst's new baby, and work in the local museum of witchcraft.

Zosime's mum is a normal English gender critical bigot. She goes to Church, she's spent a decade abusing her trans kid, and now she's organising a book burning. Y'know, normal English gender critical  bigot things.

Book burning is generally a bad idea. Tossing the grimoire of a genuine 16th century witch on the fire is a worse idea. Bigots don't have good ideas, so it's not entirely unexpected. 

The grimoire releasing magic that animates every book in town? The animated books going on a killing rampage? Mandy Green, homewrecker, showing up with a sword and a love for monster slaying. That's unexpected.

Zosime just wants normal English things normal English people would want when they're trapped in a magical murder town, like getting Amethyst and her baby to safety. But instead she's running around saving the lives of bigots who mistreat her, bumping into everyone she's ever had sex with, and coming to terms with the trauma decades of abuse has forced on her. Would it really be an apocalypse if it was baggage free?

Remember... bigots burn books. If you're not a bigot, buy books instead. 

You should start with this one.

 

 

 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Caledonia Fife
• Release date: Feb 24, 2025
• ISBN: 9798230412847

Book preview

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a Rebel Wrath book

Bigoted Book Burners Bloodily Bludgeoned by Badly Burnt Books

A Caledonia Fife novel

1st Edition

Copyright © Caledonia Fife 2025

License Notes:

First published in ebook worldwide by Rebel Wrath in 2025.

Copyright © Caledonia Fife 2024

Caledonia Fife asserts their moral rights to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved.

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With exceptions, names, characters, businesses, events, and incidents portrayed in this work are products of the authors imagination. No identification with actual persons, living or deceased, businesses, events, and incidents is intended or should be inferred, unless the stated persons, businesses, events, and incidents are real, in which case the persons, businesses, events, and incidents have been used in a fictitious manner.

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No animals were harmed during the creation of this product. Batteries are not included. Keep away from fire or flame, burning books is not a good idea. This product may be subjected to book bans by your local government. The publisher accepts no responsibility for lack of availability due to fascist governments banning books they dislike. Discontinue use of this product if any of the following occurs: numbness or weakness in the face, arm, or leg, especially on one side of the body, or if you suddenly find speech or speaking confusing, have newly developed vision problems in one or both eyes, have suddenly become dizzy, or had difficulty walking, loss of balance, or problems with coordination, or a severe headache with no known cause, as you may be suffering from a stroke due to the intersectionality overload of reading about a transgender lesbian. Diversity in fiction is known to be one of the leading causes of strokes in cisgender heterosexual white people, which is why they campaign so strongly against representation of minorities. Please consult your doctor or phone the emergency number if you are experiencing one or more of the 5 warning signs of a stroke.

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Cover Art by Caledonia Kelly.

Cover Art (c) Rebel Wrath 2025.

Content Warning

This ebook contains two stories, one told in the odd chapters, and another in the even chapters. The content warnings for the even chapters are:

Abuse

Cancer

Child abuse

Conversion Therapy

Drug use

Extreme bullying

Homophobia

Self-harm

Starvation

Suicidal ideation

Suicide attempt

Transmisogyny

Transphobia

Torture

Underage drinking

Readers from the USA may also believe the book contains underage sex.

The content warnings for the odd chapters are:

Gore

Occasional profanity

The odd chapters tell the story of magic books killing everyone and is probably the reason you chose this ebook. If you would like to read only the story told in the odd chapters to avoid the content noted above, click here. If you prefer to read the full story, just to the next page.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to dead witches.

Our ancestors murdered you and we profit from their dark deeds.

Your memory deserves more, but this dedication is all I can give you.

This novel was written in tears in Scotland in 2024.

Prologue

This is the story of how my mother’s fears led to the destruction and abandonment of Loxwick, the town where I grew up. It’s the story of a girl (me) who just wanted a normal life but was denied that from birth due to the capricious nature of fate or the cold, uncaring universe or a perverse God or whatever it is that has kids born into abusive households. It’s a story of magic and love and hate and fear and death. Mostly, it’s a story about death. The end of lives, the end of relationships, the end of innocence, the end of an entire town that had existed for hundreds of years.

Loxwick was the type of town most people immediately bring to mind when someone says: imagine an English town. It was the quintessential English small town, with a high street of charity shops and pound shops and vacant lots, the result of COVID lockdowns and online shopping and lack of investment or, and let's be honest here, a coherent and well thought through plan by the Tory government. There was a library that opened three and a half days a week, and a bakery that sold hot pies and sausage rolls, and a little corner shop they stuck a Morrisons label on and tried to pretend was a supermarket. There were 8000 people in the town and surrounding farms, served by four primary schools, five churches, one of which was Catholic, three bookmakers, and eleven pubs, one of which was also Catholic. There wasn’t much else to do in Loxwick but drink.

Beyond its dying high street were the houses, an amalgam of council and bought and private let, failing Air BnBs that no one rented because no one really wants to visit somewhere like Loxwick for more than a day. Streets that should have been picturesque were instead strewn with litter. The air smelled country fresh, tinged occasionally with manure in late spring and early summer, though it was nowhere near the sheer overpowering stench of a London Street. The bin lorries came through once a week, the buses stopped at 8pm and six on a Sunday, and there were no Ubers. Gangs, or well groups, of youths hung out on the swings in the local playpark watching Tiktoks on smart phones and vaping as the sun set.

Around the town were miles of fields: growing grain or holding horses, cows, or sheep. There is a low ditch to the north local legend said Romans dug, and some stones in a field to the south that might be all that remains of a 3000-year-old religious site. The carpark there was popular with far-travelled doggers, especially on a Tuesday night for some reason. A small group of trees too large to be a copse and too small to be a forest, known locally as the Lox Woods, is to the southwest.

Loxwick was an average English town. You may have grown up in one very similar. They are all the same, really; the same mix of block concrete buildings from the 1960s and five-hundred-year old churches with gargoyle waterspouts and beautiful stained glass window designs, and a school they rebuilt in the early 2000s that’s all glass and metal and is never a good temperature inside, and the school they didn’t rebuild and has been using temporary modular prefabs for over three decades.

The people were average English people. They would smile and seem friendly, and be courteous to your face, and behind closed doors many would hate immigrants and gay and transgender people and read fascist propaganda in the form of newspapers or on Twitter or Facebook and vote Tory and had wanted out of the EU, even though they never really understood the benefits of membership or the cost of leaving. They were people who had suffered for years, through economic downturns caused by their own voting and spending habits, through the COVID lockdown, and the rampant viral infection that killed several local people, and their own vile bigotry.

They weren’t all bad, though. Some of them were really nice people and most of them weren’t evil or good, they were just people making bad decisions through ignorance or manipulation by the press and government. Some of them remembered when journalists reported the actual news, and they still trusted what journalists said, not knowing they had sold their souls to their corporate overlords out of greed and fear and now only published press releases and polarising editorial opinion pieces designed to drive clicks to maximise marketing money.

Statistically, 31 and 2/3rds of the women in this small town had been raped or sexually assaulted. That figure is a rough estimate based on population size and rape statistics. There were roughly 3500 women in Loxwick, and 1 in 30 women in England have been sexually assaulted or raped, assuming the statistics are correct. But the people weren’t all bad, not even the men. Okay, over a hundred men in the area likely beat their wives or girlfriends, but there’s so many more who didn’t, and even the ones who did probably went to Church on Sundays, so it’s fine, right? Right?

Some crime stats were low compared to the national average. For instance, the last murder was committed in 1956, when Lucy Anbers was stabbed to death by her husband, Dan Anbers, after he caught her in bed with his brother, Jeff. It happened so long ago that Dan Anbers was executed for the crime, back before the death penalty was abolished. Jeff Anbers took over the family farm and passed away in 2004, and his son, David, then inherited what was locally known as The Murder Farm.

Other crime stats could have been high – a lot of people smoked weed, but those stats were low because Loxwick rarely saw police officers. Unrelated to the low crime statistics, because correlation is not causation, the minority population was another thing that was low in Loxwick. There were several Indian families, three of whom owned corner shops, and two Chinese families that both owned takeaways. A Turkish family owned another takeaway, Turkish Delight, and the barbershop next door, and the owners of the fish and chip shop were descended from Italians that moved to the area after World War Two. There was a Thai woman who offered a travelling massage service with no happy endings, because sometimes a Thai massage is just a massage. Her husband was a white man, and people said she was a mail-order bride. And there was, of course, more than a single Black person in the town - an entire Black family, the Thompsons, lived there. The mother was a housewife, the older two children attended one of the primary schools, the youngest was still a baby, and the father was a local GP.

Gay people were rare in Loxwick, too. Most of the gay people who grew up in small rural towns like this eventually move to London or Brighton or Liverpool, and that was as true there as everywhere else in the UK. Any gay people that remained were either teens too young to escape, or kept their sexuality at home, behind closed doors.

Finally, there were probably about 1500 disabled people in the town, though this number is absolutely a guess as most of their disabilities were invisible, and unrecorded.

₍^.~.^₎⟆

This is where I grew up, where I spent my first nineteen years of life, except for the days I had high school and had to bus to a larger, nearby town, or the occasional day out for shopping up to Liverpool or down to London, and a few weekends in Blackpool and that one holiday in Spain when I was seven, before my dad died.

The vast majority of my formative years were spent in and around Loxwick, riding my bike down miles of empty country road, or building treehouses with Wallop and Skunker, or getting into scraps with Turbo Andy, who had a dead mum. I don't know why that's important, but it was always my go to when he called me a fag or a poof or gay. Yeah, well your mum is dead, I'd say, and then he'd hit me, and then later my dad was dead, and I stopped saying it.

This isn't one of those stories where I end up hooking up with my bully, like some twisted fuckup that couldn't afford therapy. Turbo wasn't really a bully anyway. We were enemies, sure, but I wasn't a victim, I gave as good as I got, and I gave it hard.

And no, not sexually.

I'd been friends with Wallop since before I could crawl. Our mothers were friends in the distant past, though my mum had fallen out with his mum long before the end of Loxwick. His name was Allan, which I didn't find out until we were eleven. Apparently as a very young child I couldn't say Allan, so I called him Walla, which his parents and my parents took up, and over time this became Wallop.

Those wondering how I got through seven years of primary school without finding out my childhood best friend's name have obviously never been to an English primary school. The teachers called him Wallop. His parents called him it; I even heard our priest call him that, one time.

We met Skunker at nursery, and he was called that because he was incredibly smelly. Not in a not washing, body odour way, but his farts could knock out Pumba. His name was actually George.

Wallop, Skunker, and I were inseparable from the age of five until the age of eleven, and then high school separated us a little, putting us in different classes based on our abilities (lack of, in Skunker’s case) and willingness to actually work (lack of, in Wallop’s case). Wallop could have done so much more, he just never wanted to.

Skunker tried his best.

After that, we still hung out sometimes, but it wasn't like before, and I, well, I was having a difficult time. I wasn’t in a good place, and not just because I was in Loxwick.

And there were girls. I'd always known they existed, of course, but at a very young age there was no real difference between boys and girls, and as we grew older and the girls became different, I only knew them from afar, and with a lack of knowing filled with longing for the secrets I was sure they held.

I met Amethyst when I was twelve years old. We had art together, and whilst I was drawing stick figures that the art teacher despaired of, she was drawing almost photo realistic anatomically accurate demonic images and mythic representations that the art teacher thought was great, but several other teachers despaired of because she never, ever drew clothes on them.

I remember one time Mr Macklemore, the head teacher, ripped up her nude drawing of Perseus and Medusa and lectured her about Hell in front of the entire class. Thyst and I laughed about it later on, whilst she smoked a cigarette out behind the chemistry department, but I could tell she was upset about it. Not the Hell thing: she tells people she's a Satanist, but I knew she was an atheist like her parents and the Satanism thing was her playing into her goth aesthetic. She was sad about the destruction of the art and the censorship and the small-mindedness of our teachers and our idiot peers who thought it was good that she got in trouble.

She's always been really smart and really open-minded, and the best person I know. She's the first person I go to any time I have something to tell people which, okay, yes, isn't often, but it's been like four times now. She was there for me when I realised I was transgender, when my mum made me go to therapy, when I discovered my mum and her priest had doomed our entire town, and that time I slept with Turbo.

Yeah, I know I said I don't end up with my bully, but I already said he ain't my bully, and I don't end up with him, and it was only one time anyway. Listen and don't judge.

Life's hard, okay, and sometimes you just want a man to treat you like shit. Turbo's good at treating people like shit. I deserve better, I know. And I believe that. And I’m not even attracted to men. But it still felt good to feel, I don't know, useful or something, or shitty or whatever.

I’m totally lying right now. I don’t like lying so I’ll admit it to you and then it’s not lying. It never felt good.

Fuck, this has turned into therapy for people that can't afford therapy, and by people, I mean me; therapy is expensive.

Let’s get on with the damn story, okay.

Chapter One

It was September and the weather was warm, like it always is in September. The grass was brown from the summer heat and the hosepipe ban mismanagement of water by private companies had enforced, the schools had gone back a few weeks earlier, and between the times the buses picked the high schoolers up in the morning and dropped them off in the afternoon, the town was quiet.

The small-town nonsense that always happens in places like Loxwick was happening, of course. Tim Darby of Darby and Sons, the butchers, was having an affair with Mandy Green, homewrecking bitch, and half the town knew and had an opinion on it. Some thought she was a wanton and a homewrecker and blamed her for leading a good man astray from his wife, and others thought she was too young at nineteen to know better and blamed him for the whole thing.

The first group conveniently seemed to forget that Tim Darby had hit on every woman over the age of eighteen in the town for at least the last ten years and the second group had no idea just how many guys in the town had succumbed to Mandy Greens interest in the last three. Let's just say they were both as bad as each other and Tim Darby's wife, Sheila Darby, deserved better.

Mandy Green was the one Mr Macklemore should have lectured about hell.

Other than the affair, town gossip centred around me, Amethyst, Turbo Andy, Shotgun Pete, Father Vincent, and old Mrs Nell.

There was always gossip about me, and it was always the same gossip. I was the only out trans person in the town, and in a town this small, everyone knew, and everyone had an opinion and wanted to share it. Amethyst had rivalled me in gossip for years; as the only goth she had started long before I came out, and I knew she was looking forward to getting away from it all so much that it broke her heart when she had to decline the offer she got from Loughborough University. The world needs Amethyst Lord's clothing range more than it knows. It broke my heart when she refused to tell me who her baby's father is. She just said Hesperia doesn’t have a father.

I get keeping it from everyone else but imagine refusing to tell me. What a bitch, right?

I can call her a bitch because I love her, don't you dare though, you don't know her, not like I do. You didn't hold her hair back when she had morning sickness or hold her hand when she screamed obscenities at the nurses during labour, or not let her see you cry when she callously remarked that at least you wouldn't have to suffer this.

You know, because of my penis.

She meant it in love.

Yeah, it's terrifying and horrible and painful and messy and God I would do it in a minute or nine months or whatever.

And she was refusing to tell me who the father is.

As long as it isn't that old prick Tim Darby. He's more than 30 years older than Mandy Green, you know? That would be paedophilia if she was underage. Which, yes, she wasn't, so it isn't, but you know what I mean. If it wasn’t what it was, and was instead some other thing entirely, it would be that. Internet logic ftw.

Turbo was the object of gossip because he'd started adding some stronger stuff beside the weed he sold, and everyone wanted to know where it came from. How did the drugs get into our town? Anyone with half a brain would realise the only person he even knew outside of the town was his cousin, Ricky, who worked in a bar in Liverpool, but I think they preferred to imagine dark deals with Russian gangsters in dimly lit dive bars or moonlit meetings on the moors with Colombian cartels.

Shotgun Pete was a farmer who lived about three miles out past Lox Woods, just along from The Murder Farm, and had a shotgun. We weren’t great at naming people. Anyway, Shotgun Pete managed to get Loxwick 30 seconds of fame. He'd been claiming to have sightings of big black cats around his farm for years, some puma or leopard or whatever it is that gets sighted from time to time, and he must have gotten online somehow, because a film crew came out to see him and Loxwick was mentioned on a documentary about British big cats on Netfucks. Hey, they wanna platform transphobes, they’re gonna get called Netfucks.

It was an exciting time, all right? Nothing like that had happened since, I don't know, 2009 when they found those old swords in that field and realised one of the lost battles of the civil war had been five miles east of town. One of those swords was on display in the library, mostly because there was nowhere else to put it.

Look, nothing much happened in Loxwick. Small things like this were exciting, okay?

Father Vincent had been the focus of local gossip for his rants, sorry, sermons, on formication, where he had by name mentioned Amethyst as a loose woman and fornicator and never mentioned home-wrecking Mandy Green.

Why are old men so obsessed with Amethyst going to hell?

Anyway, Father Vincent was an ass, and my mum hung on his every word like he was Jesus Christ reborn.

Then there was sweet old Mrs Nell, ninety-years-old but as sprightly as, well, a seventy-year-old maybe. She wasn’t running marathons, but I thought ninety-year-olds would be more bed bound. She might still have had her mobility, but the poor dear had lost her marbles and was found wandering the town in her nighty in August, insisting she'd missed an important call from a dog.

Or from God, I'm not sure.

So, it was September, as I said, and the town was quiet during the day when the bus of school kids took off, and quiet at night too because towns of this size are never not quiet, but the gossip here was worse than in a city. Cities create loneliness by putting masses of people together. Conversely, villages and small towns create suffocating levels of crowding by putting small numbers of people together. The difference is the people. In a city, no one knows anyone else. It's easy to vanish, to fall through the cracks. In a village or small town, everyone knows each other, and there's always that one person who knows everything about everyone. They have no life, no interests and hobbies, and often they are retired, and so they live through everyone else. Then there’s their natural counterpoint, the person who seems oblivious to everything. In Loxwick, that was Sheila Darby, who didn't seem to have a clue, bless her.

I'd been working at the Loxwick museum of witchcraft for about eighteen months, and I'd been living with Amethyst at her parent’s house since 11pm the night before this all begins, because my mum had kicked me out the house and said I could go back when I got over all this attention seeking and was a boy again. I hoped that meant I'd never go back but, thanks to the UK government, I'll be considered male when I'm dead, so I worried I'd go back then if she outlived me.

It was a Wednesday. I remember that clearly, I don't know why, perhaps because Wednesday has always been my favourite day. Mostly because of Wednesday Adams, whose just like really incredible, a pale reflection of Amethyst Lord but still awesome. That doesn't matter. I don't think it even really matters that it was a Wednesday, to be honest, but it was. A Wednesday in the middle of September, and I was at work in the Loxwick Witchcraft Museum.

Oh, yeah, Loxwick had a museum of witchcraft, too.

In 1638 Anne of Loxwick was found guilty of a series of witchcraft offences under the Witchcraft Act (1562) that amounted to enchanting good men to lustful thoughts with her comely appearance, aka being so pretty men wanted to rape her, and perverting the priesthood with thoughts of debauchery, aka some of the men who