Cosmocopia

Frank Lazorg's gone mad.

The elderly, ego-driven dean of fine-art fantasy illustrators, venerated by admirers around the world, has reached the end of a lifetime of dreams fulfulled. His creative powers have failed him, his mistress spurned him, and younger rivals threaten to eclipse him. Is it any wonder he eagerly falls upon a strange new drug that promises to reinvigorate him, as both man and artist?

But his reliance on the organic high soon turns to addiction — and addiction to madness. Lazorg finds his grasp on reality slipping. He's suddenly plunged into a world inhabited by monstrous parodies of humanity, living in a culture that bears a skewed resemblance to the world Lazorg knows.

Yet as the oddly rejuvenated artist soon discovers, this new dimension exhibits its own, perhaps higher-level reality and tangibility, its own dangers and delights, enemies and lovers, including the remarkable being known as Crutchsump.
What Lazorg experiences with Crutchsump and her kind, however, is merely the first rung on the Cosmocopian ladder.

Paul Di Filippo's new short novel Cosmocopia, a 513-piece jigsaw puzzle, "The Artist's Eye," by Jim Woodring and this fabulous box. This is a limited first edition of 500 numbered sets, signed by DiFilippo and Woodring. Typical Payseur & Schmidt awesomeness.