ELECTRO-ETHERIC MINOTAUR TP

The six stories and novellas in The Electro-Etheric Minotaur collect all of Damian Murphy’s “occult retro-gaming fiction”—including two previously unpublished tales— along with newly commissioned illustrations by Le.BLUE. Combining the aesthetic motifs and arcane mechanics of vintage electronic gaming with the gnostic exaltation of ancient and modern occultism, this is fiction as Metroidvania: nonlinear exploration in the search for keys and secrets. Murphy’s rich prose is like a cheat code from a half-remembered dream (or nightmare)… where sadomasochistic rites combine with vector angels and spectral wolf-sprites in mazes with flickering walls… The video game medium is still young enough that its capacity for serious artistic achievement—even its ability to produce something like a towering new Gesamtkunstwerk of literary narrative, graphical ingenuity, and immersive gameplay—has only recently achieved widespread acceptance. Within another generation, the notion that it could ever have been in doubt will seem quaint. Yet the stories in this book hearken back to the days of the ZX Spectrum, Atari 2600, and early Nintendo consoles of the 8 and 16 bit eras. By calling back to these earlier systems with their graphical limitations, Murphy is invoking primal childhood experiences with the mystical otherworlds flickering behind CRT screens. Although the juxtaposition of occult ritual and modern electronic gaming may at first seem incongruous, anyone who has ever pursued either activity seriously will have had intimations of the other. Notions of secret areas and strategies, exploitable glitches and hidden codes, always formed part of the gaming experience, and all of them have their correspondences in occult practice. And the parallels between the astral double and the avatar of a video game character are obvious, but had yet to be explored seriously in fiction until now. —Justin Isis, from his introduction