Excerpt From MONSTER! (Coming Soon)

. . . Adjacent to the lime-enamelled kitchen is a study with a cherry wood library . . . Tomes fill every one of its shelves; covering diverse topics Mister Jamais Vu had studied at length in his youth: alchemy, eugenics, transhumanism, molecular biology, genetic engineering, occult science and the black arts of devil worship and voodoo. One of his joys in life was a master copy of the Voynich Manuscript - always on display on its ivory book cradle. He had given up trying to quantify the man-hours spent scrutinizing the pages of vellum with a magnifying glass . . . but guessed he'd dedicated half his life deciphering the marginalia of encrypted text. It had been a labour of love, one spellbound by the watercolour illustrations of the most alien of herbs and botanic oddities - Of which, he promised - I must seek to understand before my eventual demise! A table hewn with an adze is stained brown with thousand year old molasses and the tannin of prunes . . . And the beady eyes of a stuffed chough squawks through a jacket of cobwebs; amongst an array of other table top curios - one being a death's-head moth inside a glass cabinet; with its pinned body detached from its own thorax and abdomen. Casting a shadow from the far corner of the study is a custom-built sewing machine - once used to simulate a 4D atlas of the extreme high energy densities seconds after the Big Bang. The diamond canister still glows with quark-gluon plasma - just like it did when the machine's oscillating needle inked a magnetized strip of dark matter. In those days, the synchromesh, belt-drive and flywheel needed the Achilles' tendon of a strong foot to work the iron pedal. The thing only sleeps and snores now in close proximity to Mister Jamais Vu's glass armonica - causing the instrument to yawn occasionally, massaged across its bowls by the syncopation of gamma radiation . . .