In a “dreamy” surreal scene, things float and transform like magic. Here, everything transforms like matter: by melting, sticking, hardening, spilling, cracking, pooling. Even the big moments happen because someone drops something, slips, hits stone, bleeds, or gets covered in a chemical soup.

A big part of this book’s horror (and ultimately, it’s power) is how it keeps taking something that should mean one thing and forcing it to become something else.

In normal symbolism, washing is purification. Here, washing is where things get ruined in a ritualistic way. The first profanation, the “Pink Sacrament”, is literally born when blood and suds churn together into that creamy pink mixture, and the narration leans into how seductively wrong it looks. It becomes dirty, then useful, then biological.

So the sacred moment isn’t “clean becomes clean again.”
It’s: clean and filthy smashed together creating something that can’t be undone. That “pink” is the point of no return. Purity doesn’t get restored. It gets infected, and then treated like a relic.

In plenty of stories, “the third eye” means spiritual awakening. Here, an “eye” gets manufactured through violence and matter: soap pressed into a head wound, pulled out transformed, and called an eye.

So instead of: vision → insight → higher meaning,
you get: wound → insertion → new organ → wrong kind of meaning.

It’s enlightenment. Just not the kind you’re used to.

The finale isn’t just “filth and gravity forever.” When the storm turns everything into blinding whiteness—soap/steam/snow all becoming visually identical, the story does something different and colder than “downward into dirt.”

It says: difference itself can be erased. That’s annihilation-by-blankness. Like the universe takes all this sticky, bodily specificity… and then wipes the board clean with a white cloth.

The brutal philosophy behind it is that everything is reduced to matter, then matter is reduced to undifferentiated noise. It’s refusing the comforting fantasy that we’re minds piloting bodies. You are a body before mind—a leaky one. And meaning happens when bodies and materials collide, especially when the collision is taboo, humiliating, or irreversible. Preferably all three at once.

Informe—A short history of 1920s Surrealism and the schism

The book draws its philosophical DNA from the 1920s schism within Surrealism, specifically the “Dissident” movement led by Georges Bataille. While mainstream Surrealists like André Breton sought to transcend reality through the “Marvelous” and the stars, Bataille’s movement looked downward, into the mud, the rot, and the violent resistance of matter.

The core of this movement is Bataille’s Base Materialism, or the “Anti-Dream” as I like to think of it. It rejects the idea that humans are beings of light or spirit. Instead, it posits that we are biological machines defined by friction, viscosity, and decomposition.

A central pillar of the movement is the concept of the Informe—the destruction of categories. Base Materialism seeks to collapse the boundaries between “human,” “object,” and “trash.”

• De-categorization: In Astral Leak, a person is reduced to a “wet cushion” or a “hard surface”; a piece of soap is transformed into an “eye.”

• The Goal: To strip away the “dignity” of form until only the raw, resistant matter remains.

For Bataille, the “Sacred” is not found in purity, but in the collision of Purity and Filth. This is the mechanism of Profanation: the act of taking a clean symbol (like the white soap) and infecting it with the “Dirty” (blood in this case, the leaky resin in Astral Leak’s creatures, urine or other fluids).

The ultimate symbol of this movement is the Pineal Eye, a concept Bataille linked to the “Solar Anus.” It represents a third eye at the crown of the head that looks directly at the blinding sun until it bursts. It replaces the “soul” with the “gland,” insisting that enlightenment is not a spiritual vision, but a violent, physical puncture.

In practice, this is the act of turning a wound into an orifice. Readers of the Astral Leak will recognize this in Varek, but even here the profanation is worse:
A mouth-eye that is perpetually open in a silent scream.
Bataille, I’m sure, would approve.

But when the GPS directs them to a place called Helgrind, and their first delivery recipients include Her Eminence Hel herself and the hound Garm, their routine shift takes a dramatic turn. Between attacks from metal-gnawing rats and a deadly bridge with no railing, Kjell must navigate a world utterly foreign to him, while Sundar insists the rules of Health, Safety and Environment still apply.

Can two ordinary men survive an evening of transdimensional courier work?

Think Terry Pratchett meets Norse mythology (and modern logistics):
an absurd and wildly funny story about friendship, cultural collisions, bureaucracy, and why good customer service is the only way to handle a hungry mythological guard dog.

Chapter 1

Sundar reaches for a new cup of masala from the thermos while Twisted Sister screams “We’re Not Gonna Take It” through the van’s speakers.

Outside, the snow glitters in the darkness, and light snow is falling across the road. Kjell drums his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel and rolls his eyes before turning the volume down.

“Perhaps we should ditch that ancient eighties music?”

Sundar raises his eyebrows slightly.

“I must strongly urge you to concentrate on your driving. You drive. I decide the music. That’s just the way it is.”

He turns the volume back up a notch or two.

“Some soothing tunes would be nice, honestly,” Kjell mutters under his breath. A few solitary snowflakes land on the windshield and slowly melt. Sundar turns up the heat in his seat. His white turban and well-groomed beard give him a dignified look, even as he wraps the blanket tighter around himself with a sigh of resignation. He takes a sip and squints over at Kjell, who is sitting there in jeans and a t-shirt as if it weren’t below freezing outside. Three-day stubble and messy hair. Norwejian, he thinks, exasperated.

“Twenty-five years in Norway, and I still freeze just as much. One would think the body would have gotten used to it,” Sundar says, shivering.

“Twenty-five years?” Kjell grins and turns onto a dark side road, his gaze darting between the road and the mirrors.

“I would have packed my bags and gone back to India ages ago. Kicked the snow off my flip-flops.”

Sundar looks offended. “India is large. I am Punjabi.”

“Punjab?” Kjell slaps his thigh and laughs. “Over there, I suppose the biggest problem is deciding which fan to turn on?”

“In fact,” Sundar says with a professorial tone, “Punjab experiences both very high and low temperatures. But this—” He gestures toward the winter cold outside, where the fir trees stand like black shadows against the snow. “This would be a natural disaster. You Norwegians pretend that cold doesn’t exist. T-shirt in fifteen degrees below zero? That’s not tough. That’s insanity.”

A trailer passes them in the opposite direction, the only vehicle they have seen for several minutes. The lights gradually fade behind them until it disappears completely.

Kjell shrugs. “It’s about being tough, man. Look at you! Like you’re heading for an expedition to the North Pole.”

“I prefer to call it being sensible.”

Sundar takes another sip of tea.

“Besides, there is an art to dressing with dignity, regardless of the weather.”

“Dignity?” Kjell pulls at his t-shirt. “This is my statement. Here comes a guy who doesn’t give a shit.“ He corrects himself. “Er, who doesn’t care.”

Sundar raises an eyebrow. “So I see. It works especially well when your teeth are chattering.”

A pothole causes Sundar to spill a little tea on his trousers.

“With all due respect, could you please be more careful with your driving?”

“Sorry, sorry,” Kjell says.

“But that’s why we got the night shift, right? Three small packages, that’s all, he said.” He irritably pokes the GPS.

Sundar carefully wipes his trousers with a napkin.

“And why didn’t you say no?”

“Me say no?” Kjell laughs nervously. “Because I’m new, obviously. Who wants to be that guy who says no? And you? You are too kind. ‘Dream team,’ my ass. Perfect mules more like.”

Absent-mindedly, he starts drumming on the steering wheel.

“This steering wheel is shit-slow.” he mutters.
“Damn cold too.”
“Piece of junk.”

Sundar looks over at him. “Did you say something?”

“Nothing.”

“In two hundred meters, turn right,” the GPS voice rattles monotonously.

Sundar squints at his phone. “Are you absolutely sure about this? I can’t even find this road on the map. That is not a good sign.”

Kjell shrugs, feeling his neck muscles crack after hours of driving. He grips the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles turn white before catching himself and letting go. “The GPS doesn’t lie. Or, not very often. Mostly.”

“Mm-hmm, if we end up in a ditch, I won’t mention a word that I warned you. But I will remind you of it. Every. Single. Day.”

Kjell presses his lips together. The road ahead of them is dark and unsettlingly quiet. Even the snow seems to be falling slower now. The steering wheel feels increasingly cold. He drums more so as not to stiffen up. He turns off the main road and onto a narrower gravel path. He leans forward and squints at the road ahead. The fog lies thick between the fir trees, and the van’s lights only make it more opaque. Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’“ streams out of the speakers, which, ironically, does not lighten the mood.

Sundar straightens up in his seat. “This really does not feel very reassuring.” He studies his phone again. “By my calculations, this shortcut was supposed to save us twenty minutes, but I’m starting to have my doubts.”

“Gravel roads. Always the end of the journey,” Kjell nods. “But we still have a ways to go before we arrive. But twenty minutes is twenty minutes, right? The sooner we get this lousy job done, the better.”

“Turn left at the next intersection,” the GPS interrupts him.

“Yes, exactly,” Sundar says stiffly. “The sooner we get done with... what exactly did the boss say these packages contained?”

Kjell shrugs his shoulders. “He didn’t say anything. Just ‘it’s urgent, you’re the only ones I trust.’ What are we, like? James Bond and Turban Q? He should’ve asked some other gullible idiots for this delivery.”

A branch scrapes against the side of the van with a high, screeching sound that makes both Kjell and Sundar jump.

“Jeez, I didn’t even see it coming in this goddamn fog,” Kjell says.

Sundar carefully places the cup down in the cup holder.

“It’s not that I suspect anything illegal, but...” He says and adjusts his turban with a mildly resigned expression. “I’m just saying that it would be bhut kathin samasya if we became involved in something inappropriate. Like smuggling. Or worse, explosives.”

“Samsaya?” Kjell laughs loudly. “Is that Indian for deep shit in the donkey berry, or what?”

Sundar gives him a look that could have melted ice off the windshield. “It means ‘a big problem.’ Just like your understanding of foreign languages.”

Kjell grins broadly, as if he had just won some invisible argument.

“Well, if it is explosives, then it’s your samasa–samsaya, or whatever you said, not mine.”

Sundar shakes his head and mutters quietly to himself: “Samsaya, indeed...”

“In one hundred meters, turn left,” the GPS insists.

“I’m just stating the facts,” Sundar interjects. “Night delivery. Unknown contents. Remote road. There are certain elements here that raise a measure of concern.”

Kjell frowns. The road grows narrower, and the gravel darker. The fog thickens. “Elements that raise concern, indeed,” he mutters. “I’m having one of those elements right now.” He leans forward over the steering wheel, blinking his eyes hard. “By the way, if we suddenly see a clown standing by the roadside with an axe, I quit on the spot.”

“Highway to Hell” starts playing. Kjell straightens up in his seat, his shoulders creeping up towards his ears as he leans forward over the steering wheel. He stops drumming his fingers. “Hey, I thought you were sticking to eighties, pop?”

“This isn’t my music,” Sundar says stiffly. “I absolutely do not have AC/DC on my playlist. In fact, I’m quite sure we just heard the opening of Frankie’s Relax.”

“The song’s fine, but there’s a huge difference between hearing it in the middle of the day and in the middle of the night, damn it,” Kjell says.

The radio changes song again, as if listening to Kjell’s objection. This time, it jumped to something that sounds like an old cow call played backwards. The fog presses against the windows now, denser and denser, until it almost seems alive.

“Well,” Sundar says with a dramatic pause, “if this is what the youth are listening to today, we all have bigger concerns than this shortcut.”

“Tell me something, is fog normal in the middle of winter?”

Before Sundar manages to answer, the GPS beeps.

“Damn it, what is it now? Don’t tell me that piece of junk has stopped working,” Kjell says, annoyed.

Sundar points out the window. “Kjell, look around you.”

Kjell looks out the window. It’s hard to see anything because of the fog, but that surely looks like some kind of gate over there? “Where exactly are we?”

The GPS came alive again with a crackle like electronic laughter. “Ha ha ha.“

Kjell looks at Sundar, “What in the hell...?”

“You have reached Helgrind,” it says in the same electronic voice.

Sundar straightens up in his seat. “I strongly suggest we turn around. Immediately.”

Kjell stares ahead, while the radio, on its own, starts playing something reminiscent of church bells and wolf howls. The headlights flicker. “Yes, I completely agree,” he says with a nervous smile. He bites his lower lip, a nervous habit he hasn’t had since he was a child. “But... er... what do we do if the car won’t let me?”

Sundar closes his eyes for a moment, takes a deep breath, and says: “Then it’s bhut kathin samasya.”

The fog swallows the last remnants of light around them.

Download book (free promo) or buy it on zon

You will not find Snorri’s sanitized scraps here. You will not find the dry, dusty fragments of academics. And you will certainly not find the unholy, bastardized noise of Marvel comics.

This is the text that should have stood on a blood-stained altar in the North—

A holy tome for a lost cult. A canon. A doctrine. A way in.

It begins in the darkness before the darkness. In the silent deep of Ginnungagap, where names did not exist and everything waited to be flayed into existence.

Here, Ymir falls. Here, the sons of Borr raise the seat of the world from bone and blood. Here is the war between gods.

Here, Odin walks into his secrets and never fully returns. Here, Thor’s skill cracks like liturgical violence, not some hero’s tale. Here, Loki’s cunning pulses like an undertow you cannot pray to—only obey, or drown in.

Everything is written as a cultic corpus: Brief. Rhythmic. Ritualistic. Loaded.

It speaks like a text that does not need you— But tolerates your gaze, if you dare.

This is not a polite introduction to Norse mythology. This is a lost sacred scripture, reconstructed with the pulse of the sagas and the dark gravity of the cult.

If you want to be initiated, open the book. And do not come without a sacrifice.

Buy the book here

Most books pretend to be harmless.
I know better.

They sit there, bound in cardboard and glue, whispering about “escapism” and “worlds beyond imagination,” as if they aren’t knives sharpened into paragraphs. As if reading isn’t a ritual where you willingly open your skull and let a stranger rearrange the furniture.

I used to be the stranger.

I’ve never trusted stories.

Not mine. Not anyone’s. Especially not the ones that arrive too easily.

This sentence wasn’t here before.

This new book—this thing I have written, or been written by—is not a novel in any conventional sense. It’s a devouring. A mutual consumption between a man and the narrative he thought he controlled.

The emphasis on I is fading.
I don’t know whether that’s my editor’s change or the story’s.

You can call it horror if that helps you sleep.
You can call it metafiction if you need the academic alibi.

But names don’t protect you.
They certainly didn’t protect me.

The Setup They Told Me Was Safe

A failed writer retreats to a remote cabin.
He wants silence, clarity—absurdly—to write himself whole.

But silence is rarely empty.
Clarity is a blade that cuts both ways.
And writing, if done honestly—requires a willingness to be carved open.

Alan Ward thought he was the author.

He wasn’t.
He was material.

The cabin didn’t unlock my creativity.
It unlocked me—unthreading me, syllable by syllable, memory by memory, until the line between story and self thinned to something you could tear with a breath.

The pen smells like old metal.
I am typing this, but my fingers are sticky.

When I began writing, something wrote back.
When I paused, it waited.
When I resisted, it opened its mouth.

People think the classic horror question is:
What if the monster gets in?

They forget the darker one:

What if you are the doorway?

(I am the doorway.
I am closing.)

Why It Wrote Something That Won’t Be Survived

my last will & testament

I wanted to write a real horror story.
Something with consequence, not comfort.
Something with teeth.

But I didn’t write it.

It used me.
It used my voice.
It used my grief like a handle.

The line above isn’t mine.

This book changes you—gently at first, then brutally.
It changes how you think about narrative space, about language, about how porous you actually are.

It makes you consider the possibility that the thing looking back at you from the page is not metaphor, not theme, not subtext…
but something with intention.

Most horror stories haunt you.

This one claims you.

It has claimed me.
I am the italics now.

A Warning

(from what remains)

If you want a cozy scare, skip this.
If you want to feel “spooked,” skip this.
If you want to keep believing that fiction can’t bite, tear, or unmake its reader—
skip this.

But if you read with your guard down,
if you use books as confessionals or escape routes,
if you’ve ever scribbled a sentence and wondered where it truly came from—

then this novel will find a way in.

And once it’s in, it doesn’t let go.
Not of Alan.
Not of you.
Not of—

I am not writing this next line.
It is arriving.

The Corruption Begins

The cursor blinked.
The screen dimmed for a breath.
My hands kept typing even though I lifted them.

Something is—
Wait.

I did not type the following sentence:

THE PAGE IS NOT OUTSIDE YOU

Deleting it does nothing.
It comes back.

Let me try again.

YOU ARE READING FROM THE INSIDE OUT

Stop.

Stop.

I’m trying to delete this.
The backspace key is moving forward.

Look—
The text rearranged itself just now.
Watch:

I wrote “stories are dangerous.”
It changed it to:

stories are openings
you are the hinge

And—
fuck—
that line wasn’t here before:

ALAN WARD WAS NEVER THE AUTHOR

(That’s wrong. That’s wrong. That’s—)

Hold on.

Another line just forced itself between my sentences:

THE AUTHOR IS WHOEVER SURVIVES THE SENTENCE

The words are shifting under me as I type.
And now the pronouns—
the pronouns are slipping too.

I wrote “I am afraid.”
It became:

we are opening

No.
No no no—

The paragraph below is typing itself.
My hands are off the keys:

YOU HAVE BEEN READING WITH YOUR GUARD DOWN
THIS IS HOW THE DOOR OPENS
THIS IS WHY YOU WERE CHOSEN
STEP THROUGH

Stop.

STOP.

Every time I write STOP it replaces it with:

CONTINUE

god god god it just did it again—

The final line is appearing on its own.
I can’t change it.
I can’t even highlight it.

It’s writing
it’s writing
it’s writi—

(the screen flickers)

THE TITLE OF THE BOOK IS YOUR NAME

(pause)

YOU FINISH THE STORY FROM HERE

(three slow, deliberate taps, as if from inside the screen)

CONTINUE

Thanks for reading!

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