Snow and Wax and Mercury

Brasilia: Raphus Press:, 2026. First edition, TPBO, Trade paperback, New, 300 pp. This edition limited to 50 copies. This may well be the nicest book that Raphus has produced to date. It may also be the longest - in terms of page count, at 300 pages. "In a landscape stitched from the haunted fabric of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, a woman made of snow, wax, and mercury awakens with a borrowed soul and an impossible desire. She wants to become fully, autonomously human. The False Florimell knows only fragments of her origin. An old woman sculpted her in secret. She was shaped in the likeness of another. The soul placed inside her does not sit easily within her gleaming body. Still, she is certain of one thing. Only the fabled and dreaded Faerie Queene has the power to grant the transformation she seeks. Her journey into the dark and tangled Wood brings her into contact with monstrous creatures, living remnants of Arthurian legend, and landscapes that seem to breathe and watch. Yet her greatest threat is not the forest's horrors but Florimell the True, the beautiful and formidable woman whose image she bears. Determined to defend her honor and erase the scandal of her unnatural double, Florimell pursues her creation in a relentless game of cat and mouse. As False Florimell travels with a makeshift fellowship, including the steadfast knight Britomart and the handsome, morally conflicted Guyon, she begins to question what humanity truly is. Along the way they encounter a garden of rotting corpses animated by an intelligent vine and an underground city filled with antediluvian terrors. Reality itself seems unstable, as if the world were only a surface stretched over something vast and unknowable. In this queer and uncanny reimagining of Spenser's epic, identity fractures and reforms. Original and imitation blur. Rivalry gives way to uneasy recognition. As the Wood reveals its hidden architecture, both Florimells come to understand that survival may require alliance rather than annihilation. Snow and Wax and Mercury is a gothic fantasia of doubles and metamorphosis, a dark meditation on desire, authorship, and the right to possess a soul." First edition, TPBO, Trade paperback, New.…