It’s been so long since I wrote anything for the last time on sombre-plume! But I’m still here, struggling with a busy personal life and the necessity to work in both litterature and dark arts.

A few weeks ago, my dear fellow Tiephaine presented the amanuensis Sharkchild’s The Dark Verse vol. III, in a nice and positive reviews. He did won it on one of the regular giveaway organized by the american writer, and proposed to write a review as he did for years now on the french-speaking Babelio website.

So, what’s in The Dark Verse? To be honest, I wasn’t very interested in this book at first glance. It’s good looking, but its stories were very, very, very short and didn’t match m conceptions of what is a true, horrific story. I was wrong. the fact is the stories in The Dark Verse are less stories than sequences. There is a beginning and an end, but it’s not the beginning and the end. And it’s all about non-human entities, from the outer world.

As Tiephaine confessed when he sent me this book, these stories are perfect to set some entities to work with in Chaos Magick. For those who aren’t aware of what is Chaos Magick, it’s a magical practice consisting in creating your own gods and entities, instead of praying goetian demons or egyptian deities as our ancestors did in the 19th century. In his own way, Aleister Crowley was a precursor of these practices, presenting Choronzon or with the « Zazas » mantra.

What does this all has to deal with Sharkchild’s writings? Simple: everything.

Sharkchild presents god-like entites from the outer space and outer time, just as Lovecraft and is fellowship did developing the Cthulhu Mythos. You can take The Determiner from There they Freeze coupled with the Coming Death and work in a context needing to be realized in ineluctability and balance of Good & Evil. You may need to travel to the Summit from the Summit and the Sacrifice to concretize a particular work, a gift to your personnal and forgotten gods or to leave behind your path something from your past, as the former being you were before becoming the one you are now. The Names stories are perfect to start working with these writings, as the settle a particular entity, defining it and making it « ready to use ». Or, if you prefer, you could also work to curse your enemies using Entering Weightlessness or, even better, The Truncation of Being by Folding Flesh stories. This last one is my favourite, even if maybe the cruelest thing I’ve ever read until now.

There are lots and lots of potentials inside these Dark Verse, and I’m sure Chaos praticians could find their (twisted) hapiness reading the 3 volumes (to this day) of the Dark Verse. Check it out on his website!