longwing

"An ancient black cuboid, a coiled maw in its side, within which a space larger than itself, a corridor that leads to oblivion.."

Alex CF is at it again. He's created a new reliquary, this one chronicles the explorations of two cousins as they seek an ancient site of worship in the Sahara. They find what they're looking for, unfortunately for them. At the site, they find monuments of black stone, strange spirals, and unearthly geometry. Abyssal spaces that exist within mundane objects.

The story told by this handful of artifacts is fascinating and (par for Alex) quite grotesque. It's a story of madness, immoral experimentation, and impossible geometry. It had a deeply haunting effect on me, and I couldn't tell why... until I saw the footnote:

Inspired in part by “Solid Geometry” by Ian McEwan, “House of Leaves” by Mark Z Danielewski, and “Uzumaki” by Junji Ito.

House of Leaves. That novel will change the way you look at the world, not necessarily in a good way. House of Leaves was, behind all it's trappings, a story about obsession. It was a story about man's incredible impulse to stare into the void. We're so accustomed to assigning meaning to the world around us, that we'll throw our lives away when met with something incomprehensibly meaningless.

Both the book and the box therefor function as cautionary tales. Not everything has to make sense.