ISSUE 04 LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

This issue of Coilhouse is haunted.

Or maybe it’s possessed. Or it could be we’ve got a grimoire on our hands.

All we know is, viagra at some point during our editorial process –which normally involves very little cauldron-stirring or eye of newt, despite whatever “coven” rumors you may have heard– #04 took on a life of its own. It has since become a small, seething portal of the uncanny. It’s all a bit magic-with-a-k. We may giggle and wink (“O R’LYEH? IA, R’LYEH!”), but that doesn’t change the fact that these pages are spellbound, You will read of channeling and scrying, of shades and shamans, and phantoms both fabricated and inexplicable. You will meet reluctant oracles, occultists, and ghosts from the past.

Most –if not all– of the innovators included in these pages are mystics of sorts. Each one has forged a unique path to enchantment. Sculptor Kris Kuksi [p] crafts sepulchral shrines to the eternal. The sagacious, ever-weird filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky [p] consults tarot cards. Witchy songstress Larkin Grimm [p] runs Thelemic music festivals. Perfumer Christopher Brosius [] is an alchemist with scent. Once upon a time, writer Grant Morrison [p] crafted hypersigils in his comics and conferred with voodoo scorpion gods. Our cover girl, Kristamas Klousch [p] creates eerily gorgeous self-portraits that seem to have been dipped directly into the ether.

Meanwhile Joshua Ellis’ essay on the living-dead counterculture [p], Mark Powell’s review of the Edinburgh “Science of Ghosts” lecture series [p], and Mer’s own compulsive documentation of the long-gone children of pioneer America [] are all deeply nostalgic and rooted in a past that will never return. At most, their specters can whisper furtively to us from the other side of the veil. If you listen closely, you’ll hear them.

Happy hauntings,
Nadya, Zoetica & Mer