Every voyage into the Duat needs someone who knows the ancient texts, and we’ve found ours. Please welcome Ohio poet David Hershhorn to the Duat project.
David writes what he cheerfully calls unsettling verse, and he is an editor of Fear in Dust, a journal of horror poetry. He earned his degree in philosophy at The College of Wooster, where he received the John F. Miller Prize, and he is a member of the Horror Writers Association, the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association, the Ohio Poetry Association and the Academy of American Poets. When he isn’t summoning dread on the page, he plays the baroque flute, so if you hear a melody drifting through the corridors of the Pharos, it may be David.
That is exactly why he belongs aboard the MS Pharos. David brings a lifelong fascination with Egyptian cosmology, a philosopher’s curiosity about what waits beyond death, and a horror writer’s instinct for the moment a quiet room stops feeling empty. He is also a board gamer, so he knows a spell has to do more than sound eerie: it has to work at the table. Drawing on the Book of the Dead and the Book of Thoth, he researched and wrote several of our Sakhu cards, the spells every Akhu speaks aloud to empower the passengers of the Pharos. They read like incantations recovered from a tomb wall, because in spirit, that is what they are.
To explore more of David’s poetry, visit davidhershhorn.com. Read it aloud at your own risk.