You should not be reading this. This book should not exist.
It should have been destroyed, burned, erased from existence before it ever reached your hands. But here it is, and here you are, your eyes already consuming these words, your mind already infected by what they contain. The mistake has already been made. I've made mine by creating this abomination, and you've made yours by opening it.
There's no turning back now. No way to unsee what you're about to witness. No possibility of returning to the comfortable ignorance you enjoyed before you picked up this book.
This is not literature. This is not art. This is not entertainment. This is a wound disguised as a narrative, a disease masquerading as a story, a confession that should have remained unspoken.
I hate this book. I hate that I couldn't stop myself from writing it.
You'll keep reading. You'll turn the page. You'll dive deeper into the abyss because that's what humans do. We see the warning signs, the flashing lights, the barriers erected specifically to keep us away from danger, and we climb over them because we think we're special. We think the rules don't apply to us.
This is your last warning. Your final chance to turn back, to save yourself from what awaits in these pages. Put the book down. Walk away. Forget you ever saw it.
But you won't, will you?
This is not the horror you know.
You've read every "extreme" horror novel that promised to disturb you. You've collected the limited editions that claimed to push boundaries. They all kept you safe. WWWTV will not.
304 pages. Words and design by Eric Williamson. Interior illustrations by 23+ contributing artists who were paid to give you their absolute fucking worst. Born from a successful Kickstarter that embraced what mainstream publishing refuses to touch. Hand-built outside the gatekeepers, printed in a one-time run of 50, and engineered to outlast the people stupid enough to read it.
The Harvester and The Feaster are the architects of a narrative experiment that erases the boundary between fiction and reader. The author opens the book by trying to talk you out of continuing. He means it. By the time you understand why, you're already implicated in what happens next.
They tried to warn the rest of us.
Suspension of belief is insufficient; total immersion is the only course. To read is to subject oneself to an assault of consciousness. A black mirror held to the Baroque; all of the dramatic grandeur triggering sensory overload, but devoid of a God to inspire it.
This book was so vivid in my imagination, it actively gave me flashes of horror in my every day life whilst thinking about it, and I had to close it for several months.
The book made sure I knew the following: I was a sadistic and complicit voyeur throughout the eradication of human lives on Earth. I admit I was giddy at times. I'm a glutton for punishment and took the bait whenever the text dared me to continue.
Interior pages, uncut.
What if death was not your fate?
What if you were met with biological science so advanced it eradicated any semblance of control over the meat vehicle you call a body, while keeping you fully aware as it transmitted, transduced, and relayed every nanosecond of pain back into your nervous system?
What if the intelligence doing this to you was so far beyond yours that the way humanity treats "lesser" beings looked, by comparison, like a comet obliterating an insect?
And what if that intelligence was proud of the work?
This is what the book is fucking about. This is the room you walk into. The author does not flinch from any of it, and the contributing artists drew it without looking away either.
Eric Williamson plays the damnable prophet channeling his inner Abdul Alhazred. Fear not the purple prose: you are not reading for understanding. You are reading to delay the collapse you already hear approaching.
Why no real publisher would touch it.
The next time you look up at the stars, you'll wonder if something is already looking back.
Or maybe you won't. Maybe you'll close this book, toss it on a shelf, and let reality reshape itself around you like a comfortable lie. Maybe you'll choose to believe none of it matters. That we are special. That we are untouchable. That we are destined for something greater than the meat and heat and fear that built us.
And that's fine. But don't believe anything I have said here.
I'm a liar. — Eric