“I was hoping it would be an encyclopedia of dark rituals,” Mat says. The two-page spread shows a solid matrix of letters, a blanket of glyphs with hardly a trace of white space. The letters are big and bold, punched onto the paper in a sharp serif. I recognize the alphabet—it’s roman, which is to say, normal—but not the words. Actually, there aren’t really words at all. The pages are just long runs of letters—an undifferentiated jumble. “Then again,” Mat says, “we have no way of knowing it’s not an encyclopedia of dark rituals…”
