Curious Reliquaries

CURIOUS RELIQUARIES
The Feretory Duology: Book Two
by Tony W. Arnold

What if the objects on your shelf are trying to tell you something - and have been all along?

A shadowbox arrives with no letter, no explanation. Seven artifacts, arranged like a sentence in a grammar no one has ever spoken. A giant's fossilized waste. A sandpaper book that draws blood from the curious. A monkey skull grinning at eternity. Who arranged them, and why, are questions this book refuses to answer cleanly - because the answer was never the point. The arrangement is.

Curious Reliquaries is a collection of interlocking prose pieces that turns the act of collecting itself into a kind of scripture. Each piece orbits a cabinet of curiosities - real, imagined, half-remembered - and each object inside becomes a verse in an oracle that is equal parts reliquary, museum placard, and fever dream. Tony W. Arnold writes with the hushed authority of an antiquarian and the sly wit of someone who knows exactly how absurd - and how sacred - our need to hoard meaning really is.

This is a book for readers who love Borges's impossible libraries, Ransom Riggs's found-photograph strangeness, and the eerie hush of a roadside museum after closing time. It's weird fiction with the patience of a curator and the nerve of a prophet. You will not read anything else quite like it this year.

They tell a story together that none can tell alone.

Every human being, Arnold suggests, is their own shadowbox - a living reliquary of everything we've collected, survived, and refused to explain. Open the case. See what's inside.

Curious Reliquaries - for anyone who has ever kept something they couldn't justify, and loved it more for that.