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JOURNEY INTO THE UNKNOWN, by Alex CF reviewed by Amanda Gannon

The lock has been chipped away, and the battered old case swings open easily to reveal a biologist’s field kit, complete with a selection of dissecting tools, rows of test tubes, and bottles full of samples: tissue, hair, teeth. Then we find a crucifix—a jarring, superstitious note that adds to our growing unease. And finally there is a jar, well-sealed and very old. Tucked next to it, a diary and several pages of hastily-scribbled notes testify to the reality of what lies within. It’s a cryptozoologist’s dearest dream, or worst nightmare: a complete werewolf fetus. Everything falls into place, realizations like clockwork.

Faced with such tangible evidence right in our hands, it’s overwhelmingly tempting to believe—yet werewolves are figments of our imagination and lycanthropy has been scientifically explained away. Where, then, did this case of mysteries come from?

Meet Alex CF, a U.K.-based “cryptozoological pseudo-scientific assemblage artist and illustrator“ who specializes in creating relics of a nonexistent past. He brings each such project to life, like the lycanthrope research case, in meticulous detail. The process can take weeks as Alex gathers materials, sculpts creatures, assembles machines, creates slides, fills journals with notes and drawings, and replicates vintage photographs and daguerreotypes.

The appearance of age is the critical fiction here, the factor without which suspension of disbelief cannot occur. Alex’s techniques yield completely convincing results; real antiques lie side by side with artifacts the artist has created from modern materials, and—save for those items we know cannot exist—the two are indistinguishable from one another.

Exploring these artifacts fosters a quiet, subtle horror, and also an illicit thrill—a sensation familiar to anyone who has ever spent hours poking through attics, libraries, and strange old museums hoping for a glimpse of the unknown. Alex’s art represents forbidden knowledge, indeed: stories of humanity’s inhuman past, prehistoric plateaus, failed experiments, and vanishing species that never were.

Alex lavishes particular attention upon his creatures. The albino werewolf fetus seems asleep in a hand-labeled jar of preservative, hairs stirring. The dessicated body of an infant triceratops lies on a bed of excelsior, all sunken, pebbled skin and bony ridges. They are absolutely believable as real creatures, primitively preserved.

Alex’s work provides a glimpse into a time that never was, a world where the borders between science and the unknown are far wider than they are here snf now. It’s a world of time travel and werewolves, vampire hunters, Elder Things, and frightening truths; a world in which Doctor Frankenstein and Herbert West could have performed their unspeakable experiments in very good company. It is a tragic, horrific, wonderful world long familiar to us from the writings of Verne, Burroughs, and Lovecraft.

And, indeed, Alex often draws direct inspiration from early weird fiction and its recurring theme of science pitted against the unknown, exploration against ignorance. “Many of my back-stories involve men and women who have turned away from superstition in the hope of finding solace in reason,” he says. “My greatest passion is the unknown—ideas and things we wish to understand, but cannot.”

It is the attempt to understand the ineffable that forms the core of Alex’s art. It asks not only what if, but also what is—not always a comfortable question. Yet comfortable or not, somewhere deep in our twisted little hearts, don’t we hope that all those wonderful worlds we have always dreamt of are really out there, just waiting to be discovered? Wouldn’t we secretly all love to go there, even for a moment, no matter how frightening?

It’s possible. It’s not far at all. Alex has already packed you a case.

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A limited-edition pressing of Many Dead Things: The Specimens of Lord Merrylin, a photographic history of Alex CF’s work, is available now on his Web site, with a wider printing to follow. Visit www.alexcf.com to pre-order.