(2008) T.A. Baron's The Great Tree of Avalon: Child of the Dark Prophecy, Eoin Colfer's The Supernaturalist and Jonathan Stroud's The Amulet of Samarkand, The Golem's Eye and Ptolemy's Gate were all challenged but ultimately restored by the Lackawanna School Board along with other books after being pulled because of parental concerns that the books dealt with the Occult.

 

 

Sigh. I remember when I was in high school and someone managed to actually put through a rule that anyone caught with Dungeons & Dragons books on school property could be suspended. Not caught playing Dungeons & Dragons instead of going to class, and not reading the books when they were supposed to be listening to a teacher - just having the books at school. The unspoken reason behind this was that D&D was somehow occult.

 

Being D&D players, my friends and I were used to that kind of thing though.We probably even revelled in it a little. It was just a little bit after the big Satanism scare in the 80s, when a few books and movies came out suggesting that D&D players were Satanists, or that they would go crazy, decide they were their characters, and go on murderous rampages, and we'd all been exposed at one point or another to movies like Mazes and Monsters (where Tom Hanks played the world's oldest crazy high school student, driven loopy by his D&D campaign) and books like The Devil's Web, which claimed that Pink Floyd and D&D were Satan's way of trying to gain control of the world's children. Frankly, we enjoyed the notoriety. Face it, we were D&D geeks and no one was going to give us any respect any other way - so why not let people believe you were raising demons and sacrificing cats at your caffiene-and-Doritos-fuelled late-night dungeon crawls? 

 

But even so, we knew threatening to suspend us for having the books in our bags was never going to stick. We brought the books anyway - ooo, rebellion! - and secretly really hoped they - specifically, the one Mormon vice principal who was responsible for the rule - tried it, just once, just on one of us. It never happened. Too bad.