title: Searchers: The Phantom Bookshelf (Volume 1)
author:  Lively Thorne 
description: Lively Thorne is or was or will be forever an enigma. Not much else is known of this fledgling upstart other than when they were in their teens working at The Eagle and Child they sat in with Charles Williams, Hugo Dyson, C.S. Lewis, and Tolkien on occasion. Tolkien criticized Thorne's writing as "rather droll, yet with budding potential" while Owen Barfield remarked "imaginative, simple, and educational." It was Warren Lewis who compared the poetry of Thorne to Lewis Carroll and George Herbert ("but better"). Thorne's prose was deemed rudimentary by academic standards but beneficial for students in their single digits and into their early teens. No photographs are known to exist of Thorne who left Oxford, fought in two wars, and traveled all across the globe for several decades.
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  #  Chapter 1
  
  The dark musty space was cramped, and it smelled of mildew and rancid dead
  things that had mistakenly ended up inside the narrow space between Monger
  Manor’s walls. The hidden crawlspace was actually more of a labyrinth of
  interconnecting corridors, and they all led to some central location.
  
  Whatever was at the center of this maze was only known by the estate