The Nightside Codex

Justin A. Burnett, Brian Evenson, Stephen Jones, Richard Thomas, Nadia Bulkin, Christine Morgan, K.A. Opperman, Jessica McHugh, Selene dePackh, Philip Fracassi, Alistair Rey, Scott J. Couturier, S.E. Casey, Austin James, Rhys Hughes, Sarah Walker, Michael Fassbender


4.00 · 1 ratings · Published: 24 Aug 2020

The Nightside Codex by Justin A. Burnett, Brian Evenson, Stephen Jones, Richard Thomas, Nadia Bulkin, Christine Morgan, K.A. Opperman, Jessica McHugh, Selene dePackh, Philip Fracassi, Alistair Rey, Scott J. Couturier, S.E. Casey, Austin James, Rhys Hughes, Sarah Walker, Michael Fassbender
Editor's Introduction
There’s something fascinating about a book that was never written. It resists, for one, all the imperfections that inherently arise in language, all those insufficiently rendered thoughts and images that famously leave writers exasperated with their own work. Exasperated enough to inspire some, like Kafka, to advocate the wholesale burning of their oeuvre. Sometimes it’s worse. Imagine how many books out there never made it to print thanks to the gap between direct experience and these tiny scratches of ink we’re expected to render it by. A damned shame. One of the benefits of avoiding this insufficiency is that an unwritten book achieves exactly what it’s supposed to. Robert W. Chambers’ two-act play, “The King in Yellow,” drives its reader to madness. There’s no question of its power to do so. What horror writer wouldn’t want a taste of that? Luckily, the actual text is never allowed to interfere with Chambers’ unwritten masterpiece. That’s what makes it so fascinating—the burden of creation is thrown back into our own imaginations, letting us fill in the gaps with our own hidden madness. Barring the invention of some kind of live neuron mapping tech in the world of entertainment (you laugh, but just wait), nothing comes closer to a truly individualized media experience. No wonder writers as diverse and inventive as H.P. Lovecraft, Stanislaw Lem, and Jorge Luis Borges, to name a few better-known examples, are drawn to the unwritten manuscript. But that’s not entirely what this book is about. You’ll find more here than just the (un)written word in the classic sense—there’s musical scores, ancient glyphs, an autograph, and even an eBook. Worse, each extracts a terrible price from its reader. With the exception of Richard Thomas’ “In His House,” these stories aren’t additions to the lore of unwritten staples of horror and weird fiction. They are wholly fabricated media artifacts of each writer’s imagination, horrific in their nonexistence, dark heirs to the great and unreal Sutter Cane. We hope your imagination is a secure place since it’s there where the conjurations are soon to begin. We bid you luck on your descent into The Nightside Codex

romance tags

crime tags

literary-fiction tags

historical-fiction tags

fantasy tags

sci-fi tags

action-adventure tags

thriller tags

horror tags



Reviews

My review

Community reviews