The Dreambook of Skyler Dread

By Jason Murk

The Dreambook of Skyler Dread is a storybook-tale set in India shortly after the death of Queen Victoria. Illustrated with vintage 1890s lithographs collaged with contemporary comicbook panels, this is the story of the alien conquest of the Earth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jason Murk
• Release date: Oct 8, 2009
• ISBN: 9781102466710

Jason Murk

Alchemical force of nature from New Mexico. The Oscura Press publishes anarchist fiction that dares.

Book preview

The Dreambook of Skyler Dread

The Dreambook of Skyler Dread,

Hypnotist, Theosophist, & Mesmerist to King Edward VII, Emperor of India, Thibet, Lahore, and Cashmere, King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas, Defender of the Faith, Supreme Head on Earth of the Church of England.

by Jason Murk, Esq.

Oscura Press

The Dreambook of Skyler Dread

Copyright © 2001, 2009

by Jason Murk

ISBN 0-9786283-1-4

Library of Congress Card Number 2007939507

Smashbooks Edition

All rights are reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

All artwork is reproduced under the provisions of the Fair-Use Act. Published by the Oscura Press of New Mexico.

Information about Oscura Press is available aetherially via the telephonic apparatus of Alexander Graham Bell: HTTP://WWW.OSCURAPRESS.COM

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Author’s Introduction

Towards the end of 1999, somewhere between drafting chapters 9 and 10 of The Western, I came across a set of engravings at the University of New Mexico library. These were woodcut engravings of temple scenes, snake charmers and sadhoos from King Edward VII’s India. Around that same time, I was plundering hoardings of Astounding Stories magazine covers, looking for images to loot for chapter 10 of my novel. It was one of the most creative periods of my life, and since then, I’ve always somehow associated those woodcut engravings with science fictional starflight scenes.

Time passed, I finished writing The Western, and I found myself one summer afternoon hallucinating in Maine. The overwhelming sensation was of life, of my (human) place in life, of how the animals in the forest responded whenever I moved. It was a vista onto Vedic times, when men first began to band together and talk loud during the night to keep the stars awake. A sensation of the strangeness of life’s lifecycles, the colored creatures called mushrooms which grow out of the mossy soil, and for some reason, the sensation that I was being engulfed underwater, in shimmering colors which seemed somehow Shivaite. That, and the relic mindblossoms: painted red yellow and green primary-colored whorls and bubbles that I stared into and shaped for my own meaning, selfunconsciously, somewhat saddened by how primitive the experience of hallucinating is ... it’s so analog. So chemical, so uncontrolled. Where were the synthetic hallucinations I was promised in all the 1970s color comic books I read as a child?

Anyway, I don’t remember much from that particular trip, but I do recall a hallucination in which a man finds out (wakes up one morning) to discover that he’s attached to a novel he once wrote. He identifies with it. If you don’t like him, then you don’t like his novel. And likewise, if you don’t like his novel, you don’t like him. You can see how — in the welter of all the creatures who exist on the planet — there are probably some people who won’t in fact like his novel. You can see how thoughts of despair could easily begin. So the man determines that he should have the novel removed from him, by an Indian tribal elder in a ceremony whose name starts with a K. (They’ve done this before, you see.) And in this hallucination, I felt connected somehow to the British part of me. You know, the prudish reserved part, the part of me that feels like a crown prince of the former faded United Kingdom of Great Britain — after all, my mom and her family are all British, which makes me a prince of sorts — yeah, but it’s a crown prince on American soil, mossy soil at that, with all sorts of colored creatures called mushrooms growing in organic ergasmo excellence. And with these thoughts of British India, I resolved to read more Kipling.

More time passed, I changed jobs a couple times, I read some Kipling, I scored a couple volumes of nineteenth-century engravings and a couple boxes of those 1970s comic books I had read as a kid, and I found myself stuck for a couple months in Toronto — in one of those former British Dominions beyond the Seas — stuck in Toronto while I could have been in India instead, and now look, look:

Imagine for a second that Rudyard Kipling once wrote a book of science fiction — jungle fiction, Vedic starship fiction. Imagine that he wrote it somewhere between chapters of Kim, around where he writes The Lama looked forth, a hand on either side, with eyes that shone like two opals. From the enormous pit before him, white peaks lifted themselves yearning to the moonlight. The rest was as the darkness of interstellar space. Imagine that Kipling just-now begins inter-alia a short science fiction book, imagine that he puts down his draft of Kim, picks up another pen, and stares off into interstellar space — most of the universe, after all, is unknown matter — dark matter, dark energy — and we’re only aware of that liminal amount which comprises our stars and galaxies, tiger skins and peacock plumes. But what about that unknown dark-known intuitionist madly perspiring neutrino congers-orrery of Tilt-A-Whirl galactic Ganesha intrigue? What about stone spacecraft flights to King Edward VII’s India on a summer’s night? Tiger-axioms, the night language of alien souls when they speak to themselves in the dark? This unknown dark-known dreaming, this is the night-star of Mitra and Varuna, this is the Dreambook of Skyler Dread. This then is that book that Kipling might have written, best beloved. And the book starts in...

... another time, another world.

In the age of wonder!

In the age of wonder, yes, and the age of amateur theatricals too. It’s the age of gasoliers and telegraphs, the age of amateur scientists whose enthusiasms include theosophy, industrial engineering, and flannel waistcoats. It’s the age of the burly women who love that type of man.

It’s the age of the telephonic guitar and transmitting apparatus.

It’s the age of King Edward VII — Emperor of India, Thibet, Lahore, and Cashmere, King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas, Defender of the Faith, Supreme Head on Earth of the Church of England — and it’s the age