1– the release of Blue Prince earlier this year sicced a pack of puzzle game nerds onto the Manson market. Previously, his books were uncommon but not too hard to find, and generally went for less than $20. I feel safe in saying that none of us have been thrilled with the loss of accessibility, but since the books are out of print it’s not likely to change much anytime soon. I know the price has gone down somewhat since this spring, it might be worth checking again.

2– Probably not in that manner of speaking. Manson has very limited internet presence and has been out of touch from everyone here for quite a while. In addition to his puzzle books, he’s illustrated several children’s books which might be less prohibitively expensive. I believe there’s a list of them somewhere in the “Ephemera” dropdown.

“Reconnoiterer White Raven,

I am a connoisseur of the atrocious. I wish to wax waywardly upon your zenethic achievement. Your exegesis of the odd is an obsequie of a preternatural order, your constant gorgon’s knot being one of a superlative urgency of the constrained pieces which permeate House of Leaves and the constant anguish of the all-seen unknown, the profound, and the hourly immersion of mystical of the all-consuming of the and the catching, cauterized and ambushed echoes of a zephyrdanse, a pure and consumptive phlegm of veritable atrocity.

My craving for enigmas lies within the riddles of narrative and of the semioticisms of symbolism; however, I have also found a fixation with tangible labyrinths and multicursal courses.

Your amphigorical compendium is a splendid and a feullimort amicability of the passing influences, the indiginatural revolutions of shattered and of absolute anomalation, and this I cosmically laud and adaxially commend. Your indelible and impeccable omni-brief but lucubrated descriptions weave a symbolic enigskein. If such a potent echo of the manifest destinies of all manifest or predestined Cosmicism reigns here, what a toilous echo of sameness must be a singular degree of lonesome bereavement, of ultimate and unsurpassed apparition and relentless vessel of a tumultuous burning of such unbounded infestation of Bungalow universes- a last Ligottian recursion of ashen halls? These pure and Amoraciac vessels lead one to Tsalal, because you have woven them so by your recursive riddles. A garden of forking paths rests herein. A petroglyph is here found.

A baleful or a beating telltale heart and a raven of some nepenthian shore have been made herein, and the tale is yet consummately and vokely untold.

If the broken and the bare eisencourse of the fraught Nethescurial, the frenetic rhythm of the constant train, is ever once a near-brought to the anemic sanctuaries of a rising contrivance of the all-unknown importune- the vicissitudinals of a broken and a futile schematic- and inventions of unknown and unseen vestiges of the grief, and this I find within your various phrontisteries.

I shall soon pen for you an epistle of the most eschatological nature and of the most farfamed ’Pataphysical abstrusity as of a starfarflung galaxy, a sequel of the nature which has never been a sensible place, a piece of the perfecture not another mere foe- the pure and the preserving of a failed and a desolate course of coarse collision and pugmidecay- a belated coven of a false and a futile heart of the unwritten law, the dearatuateenormite decadence of unspooled and unstrung chordophones.

You may contact me as is your wont.

Ambageously,

A.R. LaBaere”

I include herein a missive, which we sent secretively via the Trystero, to the White Raven:—

“An Encoded Companionship

Fellow Sojourner White Raven,

I was most moved by your collections of ruminations. I recorded therein a reflection for your delectation. I was most moved by your various theories and treatises. You have woven a symbolic crux. I assimilated new vocabulary and avenues from your perplexing trove. I thank you for your editorials.

As yourself, I am a profoundly intellectually gifted entity. I share your studies of iconography, of semioticism, and of experimental fiction. I lucubrate upon scintillating tomes and tales. I am a collector and disciple of Poe, a declamator of the reprobate and the precepts of the pure and the cwms of the buried, and I sew conundrums. The enormous ambergrist of all strange perfumes, the pertinacious echoes of a feebling and invigorating self, the enormous collections of the unquantified murk and the sore echoes of all the pure and the educed incongruities of the Outside.

I am a fervid collector of the abstruse and of the more perfected forms of destructive collapse and the all-gnawing discrepancies of the unseen calamity- the risk of a flighting gale- the flown echo of all creations becoming as a pure folly of the fore which has been the toil of the constant and the unrelenting morasses of a vast and a keeping of all soured failed or all ambient urgencies of the untamed vistas of flight, of the pure and unadulterated ambages of Weir. The sooth is ensconced within the purity of the Universal Jest. I occupy myself with linguistic invention.

My influences include Mark Z. Danielewski, Thomas Ligotti, and H.P. Lovecraft. During my childhood, I devoured the works of Edgar Allan Poe, and I continue to pen his influence. I encapsulate myself within their declivitied fens.

I am an explorer of ignominious climes and of the purest suppositions of the outcast, ensuing sigils of pressing and of presiding mores and moors of a constant rush of beaming and boring etudes of the more unseen and all-sallying blows of the Outside. I keep a library which includes the honored House of Leaves within a designation of priority. I seek symbolic puzzlements, and I prize The Navidson Record. Each metafictional tale fills me with bewitched awe; I shall soon resume my reading of Brian A. Aldiss’s Report on Probability A, and the continual exhumations of the all-encompassing layers of narrative. The perfect or the perfected eye, the pure and the untouched fathoms of the unformed and the contiguous consiliences of the spiral staircases to unknown nativists, the precipitous and the brink of the all-surpassing foam of the forming, the breaching, the pouring of a feeling which has never so been consummated as has been only inured within the ices of xenomorphic moraines. I must know the Songs of Rasu Yong-Tugen, Baroness de Tristeombre, and I must find the climaxes of these library-livres. Of the forming and the impure am I ever omniscient, perhaps to my devastation.

The more complex enigmas of unreality of a variety of riddle which should not be solved, for what is genuinely paradoxical is unfathomable. House of Leaves should have no answer because answers are products of reality and of logic.

The pure amalgamations of a vengeful and an overwhelm of intruding and unnatural antics of every impossible convolution must pour forth from those such as we.

I seek to solemnize and conjure the creations of those who have come before me. I am the author of Rene Descartes Does Not Exist, and of The Abyss Laughs. These works comprise the The Abyss Laughs series. I seek to evolve Cosmicism. I train myself without relent.

I practice cognitive exercises, and I maintain my own puzzling palace of Loci. I have constructed this place of the most ardent ligature and the most ardent toils of a precipitous climax- this being the consummation of my goals- and I craft noetic obstacles within my visualization. I seek to learn to study, and I am an avid follower of mathematical topology. I hunt the pinnacle of intellectual capabilities.

I am compelled by our similarities. It is my fervent hope that we shall initiate a confederacy, and I devoutly wish that we should share our propensities. I wish to share with you my descryings.

The moment is arrived.

I leave you with the following intrigue, and I am certain that you are likely to find within it the pinnacle of the pure mystique, the pure and the apropos and the unpenetrated regions of the unfathomable Cosmicisms which lurk by each possible symphony of terrible uncommoding.

Fervently And Conjuringly,

Destructor A.R. LaBaere”

Any party who may be party to a prerogative to partake of parlay and persiflage may peer herein:

a.r.labaere@gmail.com