Evil Book Name Generator

An evil book earns its reputation before anyone opens it, so the title has to do the threatening. The names that have lasted, from Lovecraft's Necronomicon and Robert Bloch's De Vermis Mysteriis to the Darkhold and the Book of Vile Darkness, follow a few quiet rules: they borrow the vocabulary of real liturgy and scholarship (codex, psalter, breviary, treatise, apocrypha), they favour Latin or a made-up dead language, and they promise knowledge that should have stayed buried rather than simply sounding scary.

The most useful pattern for original titles is a respectable form word attached to an unsettling subject. A Bestiary of What Waits Beneath or a Treatise on the Husbandry of Ghouls reads like a real book that a real, deeply wrong scholar sat down to write, which is more frightening than a title made of pure menace. Physical detail (flesh-bound, wax-sealed, moth-eaten) tells the reader what the object feels like in the hand. Named authors (Aldric's Catechism of Rot, the Last Book of Sister Agathe) suggest a history and a chain of owners who came to bad ends.

This list blends canon tomes, Latin titles, church-register forms and plain-spoken horror titles, so you can match the tone of a gothic novel, a Call of Cthulhu campaign or a D&D warlock's patron gift.