Hotel Zymoglyphic

In the fall of 2018, the Zymoglyphic Museum sent its resident scribe, Jason Squamata, a.k.a. the Orakuloid, on a two month solo expedition to the fabled Zymoglyphic region. His mission was to penetrate its enigmatic fogs and bring back hitherto unknown insights about that mystery-enshrouded land that have up to now evaded the museum’s researchers. He became so entangled in its multidimensional miasma that he has yet to find his way back. We believe he may have gone native. Fortunately, we have been able to acquire his journal entries via special envoy. -- from the Foreword Illustrated with views of the Zymoglyphic region!

Contains coded incantations for the summoning of densely tentacled dream lovers and the sublimation of one’s own skin into fictoplasmic dreaming...recordings from a haunted museum, fragmented confessions of a desperate surrealist who pursued an unknowable lover through the gates of madness into a kind of feverish paradise, where all the opposites are reconciled and the night becomes his bride.

Before my disappearance, I, too, was oppressed by the gray fevers and anxieties of a woolly world in crisis. Then the shadowy forces behind the Zymoglyphic Museum sent me on a special assignment. Beyond the beyond with a virus and a voice, in search of the secret sacred city. That’s the kind of guy I was. Any dumb thing for a laugh. This book will be the evidence, when all my crimes against sadness are exposed. Every copy purchased brings me closer to materialization. I might grow skin again if you buy this piece of me for all your friends and familiars. And then I will shake your little hand. And all will be well.

-- Jason Squamata

This mess of greasy figments, splattering dream juice
all over this goddess-forsaken roadside motel room.
Or is it some opulent luxury hotel, like the Zymoglyphic,
where a different flower of madness blooms in every room
and the jungles extend forever without and within,
into myth and fever and majesty.

-- from Canto 62: Fictoplasm Junkie

To purchase online: Bookshop.org, Powell's Books, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble

Available locally in Portland OR:

Powell's City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside

Mother Foucault's Bookshop, 523 SE Morrison

Listen to Jason read 13 selected cantos with musical accompaniment

Audio version of entire book, narrated by the author, in four parts - no music (headphones recommended)

Bonus tracks: Readings with musical accompaniment by Mark Savage

A Plague of Pilgrims

Zymoglyphic Appetites/Secret Auctions

Also by Jason Squamata: Oneiric Memoir (Zymoglyphic Museum Press, 2020) and Hypnozine: The Birth of Hypno (Deep Overstock, 2020)