The Best Literary Easter Eggs Across Fiction and How They Could Help Your Book

Don’t you just love the mini serotonin boost you get when you spot an easter egg in a book? No, not that kind of Easter egg... That would be messy.

But a small nod, a pop culture reference, an inside joke, a self-referential message, or a piece of foreshadowing can give the easter egg spotter (and, indeed, the easter egg creator) an enormous sense of satisfaction when found.

Sometimes they’re obvious, designed to be detected, but sometimes literary easter eggs are positively microscopic, giving the reader added pleasure in their discovery.

Plus, it’s a deliciously creative way of showing how rich and vibrant a writer’s world really is, and a different way to get invested in the story. Have you thought about using them in your own writing?

We wonder what the Easter bunny will make of these...

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So, just to double check:

What is an easter egg?

Well, in this sense, an easter egg is a fun, cheeky wink across a piece of art, hidden in plain sight. Anything that creates a moment of fun meta self-awareness in a book, film, video game, TV show, song, or beyond could count as an easter egg. Even a secret message or a hint of something coming would count.

For example, many comic book fans scour Marvel movies for them, such as spotting Captain America’s shield in Iron Man, or The Beatles making light of the famous “Paul is dead” conspiracy theory with a reference to it in Strawberry Fields Forever.

In the other sense, an Easter egg is a big, lovely chocolate orb sort of thing, quite popular during the Christian observance. But you knew that.

I’m always telling writers to put easter eggs in for themselves as little pops of joy. I have tons in my books that mean something only to me!
—Alice Kuipers

Classic literary easter eggs seen in books

Let’s take a look at the different types of easter eggs that you might read (or write!) in fiction, and why they work so well.

Secret codes and messages

Such subtle allusions can help readers feel a sense of accomplishment when they happen upon them. And in turn, writers just love to weave little clues and whispers throughout their stories. It’s like stitching in a special thread for their most eagle-eyed of readers.

‍The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown is quite literally a tale about cracking a code, and, as such, the book includes many a tasty nugget for the readers to discover, too. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski includes several intricate codes for people to track down, nestled in letters and footnotes.

Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, The Gold Bug, tells of three men searching for buried treasure—but Poe uses cryptography within the writing so the reader can play along too. The Artemis Fowl books also employ hidden codes through fictional languages, as our editor Elizabeth Kulhanek once spotted.

The paperback edition of Artemis Fowl (a favorite series from my childhood!) had a chain of symbols running across the bottom of the page as part of the book’s design. There’s a plot thread about boy genius Artemis decoding the fairy language, and I realized that the book’s design might actually have a message. I have a vivid memory of feeling like a girl genius when I figured out the full alphabet and cracked the code!
—Elizabeth Kulhanek

These nods add flavor to our favorite stories.

Most readers might know this one... Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is crammed with quirks and quiddities, and that’s exactly why we love it. Perhaps one of the most famous literary easter eggs is an acrostic poem, A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky, which can be found at the end of the Alice in Wonderland sequel, Alice Through the Looking Glass. Follow the starting letters of the poem, and you’ll see they spell ALICE PLEASANCE LIDDELL, the real person who inspired the creation of our titular character.

Characters crossing paths

A lot of fantasy world-building authors (such as J.R.R. Tolkien or Ursula K. Le Guin) inevitably find different characters bumping into each other across different stories, as is the way of their sprawling adventures.

But it’s extra exciting when it occurs in contemporary fiction—especially if it’s unexpected. Stephen King is perhaps the, er, king of this, with the likes of Dick Hallorann from The Shining popping up in It, or Father Callahan from Salem’s Lot crossing the streams into the Dark Tower series.

Emily St. John Mandel is a great modern-day example of an author who blends her stories together, and in turn, her characters. Sea of Tranquility and The Glass Hotel, for example, are intrinsically linked, with certain friends of certain characters in one book having a bigger role in the other, adding more color to their respective narratives.

Writer and author coach Katie Khan praises Sarah J. Maas, who often introduces crossover characters in her works.

The hype when Sarah J. Maas’s beloved characters from A Court of Thorns and Roses (ACOTAR) appeared in her (seemingly unrelated) series, Crescent City, sent the fandom into overdrive. How would Bryce, a character from a modern fantasy world with technology, weapons of mass destruction, mobile phones, and bright pink sneakers, fare in a pre-industrial world full of magical fae? Pretty well, it turned out—though the expectations of the fandom for more, more, more might’ve left a few of SJM’s 80 million readers unsatisfied.

But the Maasverse is now established, the timelines entwined, and the door is firmly open for crossover characters and easter eggs in future ACOTAR books—meaning the enormous fandom can’t risk missing a single volume in any of the author’s series. Genius.
—Katie Khan‍

Author and writing coach Dhonielle Clayton loves how author Kate Milford folded a reference from her book into her online presence.

New York Times bestselling author Kate Milford is the queen of literary easter eggs. When I first met her in the early 2000s in an online writing group, her bio said she was from Nagspeake. We are both from Maryland and I thought to myself... Wow, where is that? I thought I knew all the cities in Maryland. I went googling and couldn’t find it.

For years, I thought I had just missed a city in my home state, and then I started reading for Kate and realized all of her books were set in or around or in conjunction with this alternate place she’d created. Each one of her books, from The Boneshaker to Greenglass House to The Left-Handed Fate, have characters in the past, present, and future that have loose connections and shared histories. That’s the joy of a Milford book—you never know what she’s threaded in and how it might connect to her larger canon. All of her books and easter eggs remind me of my inner child and deserve for books to extend beyond the page.
—Dhonielle Clayton

References to other books and pop culture

While some writers may prefer to set their stories purely in a fictitious location, with everything around the protagonist completely fabricated (like having a fictitious government or fictitious songs), others like to pull a little bit of the real world into their stories.

In George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones spin-off book Fire & Blood, eagle-eyed fans noticed that several of the characters were named after characters from The Muppets, such as Lord Kermit Tully!

In Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami, the protagonist is constantly absorbing real-life pop culture, reading books like The Great Gatsby and listening to records of the era, which really helps paint a picture of his nostalgia. Indeed, The Beatles song that the book is named after comes up in the story in a vital emotional scene.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s easter egg in The Great Gatsby is a clever self-reference in the epigraph, attributed to “Thomas Parke D’Invilliers,” a fictional character from his own debut novel, This Side of Paradise.

Although adding in too many real-life references could risk becoming too distracting for a reader, who may be looking to escape somewhere else entirely, they can, when used cleverly, bring an extra layer to the character’s world, creating extra connective tissue.

Breaking the fourth wall

Certain post-modern texts, going all the way back to The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, defy the norms of traditional story writing and take great, mischievous joy out of breaking the rules.

Written across the mid-1700s by Laurence Sterne, the novel’s central joke revolves around the protagonist’s inability to tell his own story properly.

This stream-of-consciousness style results in all sorts of literary oddities, such as addressing the reader directly (“you had better throw down this book at once!”) and even leaving full pages totally blank.

Hundreds of years later, Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius employed similar Tristram Shandy-esque inside jokes. For example, the book features a “Rules and Suggestions for Enjoyment of This Book” guide, such as skipping entire sections! Heaven forbid!

Editor Emily Kitchin notes that, sometimes, such literary anarchy can be staring right at you before you’ve even turned the page.

Adam Silvera’s They Both Die at the End breaks the fourth wall in the ultimate way because it is, literally, in the title. Let’s just say you don’t have to wait until the final page to figure out how this story might conclude.
—Emily Kitchin

Burying easter eggs in illustrations

Maybe you don’t even need words at all. Conveniently, a picture speaks a thousand of them. Many fantastic novels employ maps, images, or illustrations to further embellish their stories, which can be quite powerful tools for an easter egg. One example is J.R.R. Tolkien, who often added hidden references in more visual ways within his books, such as the maps of Middle-earth. Tolkien even included messages in Tengwar (the artificial script used to write Elvish languages) and other runes in the covers and title pages of The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.

JRR Tolkien’s “easter eggs” were so extensive that I’m not even sure I’d call them easter eggs! He’s famous for creating entire languages, runes, mythologies, and histories for his novels.

So whenever you see Tengwar or Cirth runes on the covers of his books, you’ll find that these can be translated. For example, one cover of The Hobbit has runes that translate to “The Hobbit or There and Back Again, being the record of a year's journey made by Bilbo Baggins of Hobbiton; compiled from his memoirs by J.R.R. Tolkien; and published by George Allen and Unwin Ltd.”

He wanted his novels to feel like genuine academic records, which is part of why his worlds feel so immersive!
—Elizabeth Kulhanek

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Sometimes, illustrations can bury literary easter eggs more connected to the plot at large, as in Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey. The central mystery is punctuated by illustrations throughout the book, which tease key objects related to the case for readers to discover.

What a novel idea!

‍Literary easter eggs could be the perfect thing to give your plot an extra kick. The Novelry’s course, The Big Edit, is all about transforming your first draft into something special, where you’ll get first-hand advice from editors on how to polish your novel.