YMMV / The Elder Scrolls In-Universe Books

• Complete Monster: The Horror at Castle Xyr: Sedura Iachilla Xyr, wife of the preeminent lord of Castle Xyr and seemingly The Ghost at first, turns out to be a Torture Technician with a scientific interest in Destruction magic. In correspondence with a fellow necromancer, Iachilla purchases innocent slaves and magically tortures them to death in every way imaginable. Castle Xyr's cellar is bloated with victims melted, frozen, electrocuted, torn apart and sewn back together, and among her victims is her own maid Anaram whom Iachilla slowly poisoned to death so she could impersonate her.
• Fridge Horror:
  • The Red Kitchen Reader becomes a lot creepier when you realize the author's description of the "Red Kitchen" in Cheydinal closely matches the Cheydinal Dark Brotherhood Sanctuary.
  • The Twist Ending of A Dance In Fire where both of Scotti's contacts in Valenwood end up becoming a main course was a rather nasty surprise, but upon looking back the reader will notice some disturbing foreshadowing as early as the end of chapter 5. When Scotti finally finds Jurus and Basth both are noted to be extremely fat and Jurus in particular mentions never having turned down food when it was offered to him. In other words, the Bosmer were fattening both men up and likely planning on eating them long before Scotti even arrived!
  • A Scholars Guide to Nymphs: A relatively obscure Daggerfall book which is a standard academic paper on a scholar finding and befriending a nymph. It all seems to be well... until you reach a particularly scary addendum where the story ends with an editor's note stating that said scholar vanished from civilization shortly after writing the paper, where his current whereabouts are unknown. Just what happened to him, did the Nymph kill him? Or did something worse happen... That being said he could also have gone native and joined her.
• Genius Bonus:
  • The narrative in Hallgerd's Tale appears to be inspired by something that reportedly happened between Emperor Marcus Aurelius of Rome and his queen Faustina.
  • In the second book of The Feast of Saint Coellicia, the first course includes a dish referred as "drowned garnetbeaks", which consists in an unspecified kind of animal (presumably birds) killed by being drowned in fortified wine, then plucked and eaten whole while wearing a cloth draped around your head (to trap the alcohol's vapors from the meat, and to prevent organs and juice to be spilled while eating them). The whole entry is a completely accurate depiction of a real life French delicacy cooked from the ortolan bunting, a small species of European passerine bird. The last sentence, stating this practice has drove the garnetbeaks to extinction, also refers to the fact that the ortolan bunting is now legally classified as a threatened species.
• Magnificent Bitch: A Hypothetical Treachery: The tricky Dunmer battlemage Inzoliah first demonstrates her cunning when she tricks and slays two members of her own adventuring party in order to make off with their valuable treasure alone. Left at an impasse with the one other mage of the group and both of them now forced to wait for their magicka to regenerate, Inzoliah affably banters with the mage about a "hypothetical treachery" between them, bouncing ideas back and forth about how they'd slay the other. Inzoliah suggests that if she were to incapacitate the mage but he were to survive, Inzoliah would leave him a healing potion as a token of respect. When Inzoliah is injured herself, the mage leaves her a healing potion, ignorant of the fact Inzoliah had secretly been leeching away his life and magic the whole while. When Inzoliah meets the fatigued mage later down the road and he asks if she'd return his gesture, Inzoliah denies him: "she doesn't sound like a fool."
• Paranoia Fuel: Confessions of a Khajiit Fur Trader ends with the Villain Protagonist stating he has a lock-pick, stating how poorly maintained the door to his prison cell is, and threatening the reader. Especially if you're playing as beast-race. The only consolation is that if you're reading it in Skyrim, the Fur Trader is probably long dead. If you're reading it in Online, on the other hand...

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