Penny Dreadful: The Devil's Footnote
The grimoire is bound in human skin, and the skin remembers the first man who tried to destroy it. Thirteen apprentices failed; Bram Holcomb is the fourteenth, and the only one whose mind matched what the book requires. Every creature he catalogues is recorded twice, once in his pages and once in a reverse index he cannot read, where his own weaknesses are filed for the monsters to find. To forge a weapon he must surrender a memory; to borrow a saint's miracle he must trade years of his life and let an old wound from a death he has not yet died rise closer to the surface. He carries the entire Penny Dreadful show in his head, but the book is being edited by John Dee, a sorcerer who fused his soul into the binding four centuries ago and has been steering every kill toward enemies dead since the Renaissance. Bram thinks his scholarship is a shield. The acrostic hidden in his own grimoire reads: you read what you write.