This is a highly amusing parody of a Certain Book. I don’t know if you want to actually spend money on it (unless you have someone in your life who is really taken with DVC and can take a joke. Or not – then it might even be more useful.), but it’s worth a few minutes in the bookstore.

It’s actually a little more complex (!) than DVC and cleverly written. I’ve not finished it yet, but the best thing Clements does is play off Brown’s habit of making simple things so very very sinister and mysterious:

The Grand Bibliotheque was an extraordinary building, a confection of intersecting right angles, so that each of its four perfectly straight sides met in four perfectly geometrical corners. Built in 1823, many believed it was modelled on the Pengaton, in Washington, the headquarters of the most powerful army the world had ever seen, but this was a mistake. It was in fact based on a far older symbol, the square, which cropped up almost everywhere you cared to look, but was not, in fact, a shape that existed in nature.

And let the people say, "Heh."

(And thanks to the reader who passed it on to me!)