The Place of Shells

By Spyder Rex

In this full-length sequel to The Web Iridescent, we are confronted with a question: What happens to the pieces of reality that are finished, cast aside, and forgotten?

Puck was in the middle of a morning thought-Humans are frozen gods...-when his wife reached across the breakfast table, pulled an anomalous zipper from his hairline, and peeled his face away. Plunged through the parted seam of his own skull, Puck tumbles into the Place of Shells: a surreal metaphysical expanse where reality discards what it can no longer use. Here lie empty hulls, hollow books, unopenable doors, and completed forms stripped of their living interior. Faceless, with shimmering, hungry colors pooling in the void where his features used to be, Puck is consumed by an agonizing need to finish the interrupted sentence that cost him his existence.

In this purgatory of closed things, existence is caught in a bitter philosophical war. The Seam guild, led by wanderers like Nook whose bodies stretch into infinite corners, seeks to "unfinish" what has ended, prying open seams to let dead husks breathe. Opposite them are the Blades, craftsmen like Dram who slice open reality with raw, irreversible boxcutter wounds to admit light. But both factions are threatened by the Naming Office, a chilling bureaucracy devoted to the dogma of Partism. Commanded by Registrar Canon, the Office is executing "The Completion"-a sweeping administrative mandate to categorize, label, and permanently seal every unresolved thought, broken sketch, and open wound until the universe is rendered perfectly, fatally silent.

Given the name "Reginald" and put to work cataloging the husks of dead ideas, Puck is drawn into the machinery of total finality. Meanwhile, across the torn folds of Being, his wife Cendy drifts through fractured dimensions carrying his warm, unzipped face in her pocket, stalked by a monstrous, beautiful force lurking between waking and dream.

As the deadline for The Completion closes in and the corners of eternity begin to fold, Puck must confront the terrifying architecture of mind, myth, and memory. In a world where reductionism is a scalpel and the surface is deeper than what lies below, can an open wound survive a universe desperate to close it?

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HKF66FRW
• ISBN13: 9798175679350
• Release Date: September 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 262 Pages
• Weight: 0.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"