BASILISK

They called it the Basilisk.

Nobody could agree on what it looked like.

A serpent with a crown. A bird with a scorpion's tail. A creature whose eyes could kill and whose breath poisoned entire cities.

The first witness was a frightened boy in ancient Mesopotamia. His village had burned, his family was gone, and he'd seen something he couldn't explain.

He spent the rest of his life looking for it.

Thousands of years later, people are still looking.

An Assyrian king celebrates a conquest. A Roman soldier defends a republic by helping destroy it. A priest discovers that God is remarkably understanding about stolen silver. A slave trader balances his accounts. Revolutionaries murder in the name of liberty. Modern governments discover that almost anything sounds reasonable if you call it necessary.

Every century has its monsters.
Every century has its excuses.

Told through unreliable testimonies, private letters, military records, obscene marginal notes and fragments of a manuscript nobody can quite explain, BASILISK is a darkly funny, deeply unsettling journey through the things human beings have done to one another.

And the extraordinary lengths they've gone to explain why.

Part historical horror, part psychological satire, part narrative poetry, BASILISK follows one ancient legend from the first cities of Mesopotamia to humanity's imagined future.

Somewhere along the way, the creature becomes harder to find.

The evidence doesn't.

Four thousand years of civilisation. An unfinished manuscript. And a question nobody particularly wants answered.

What if there was never anything to blame?