The Museum of Atheism: Mycelial Life Renewed

On Christmas night, a small girl is crowned at a pageant, before stumbling into the snowy darkness, alone, to meet her greatest fan. Set in Rosewood’s forest, the “creeping liquefaction” of the dead produces a fungal harvest that casts a spell on the town. In the endless dark of winter, feral creatures thrive, and psychedelic spores infect the air. The Museum of Atheism, deep below ground, is full of hallucinatory terrors.

I’m so grateful to the mycelial network of people who helped me to re-birth The Museum of Atheism this September.

For Calamari Archive who became the cocoon for this new iteration of my strange little horror story. Derek and Garielle showed me tenderness and care throughout the sometimes violent inner process of re-making the book.

For wonderful friends and loves who fed the soil with spores.

For generous readers who extended its fungal network.

Special thanks to Kirin Khan for her lovely review that brings the past and present versions together:

“Experimental, beautiful, disturbing. If you like straightforward narratives you might not like this book. But if you delight in the beautifully strange, the nonlinear, the lyrical and symbolic, the violent and inhuman, you’ll love this. A frightening fairytale, surreal, not the story you think you know. A book that reads like a spell, meant to be read slowly. It unfolds like a strange dream, and the nightmare. A book I still think about years after reading it.” —Kirin Khan

Image caption: A watercolour of two fruiting bodies of the fly agaric fungus. The image is taken from the Wellcome Collection.