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In 1967, a now-departed visionary—Memphis Sam, often described as H.P. Lovecraft reborn—sketched the rough outline of a cryptic tale said to reveal the occult origins of World War I. Five years later, Blue Öyster Cult began weaving fragments of that myth into their music, culminating in 1988 with Imaginos, the band’s most expansive transmission of the saga.
This book, as its title declares, offers an “expanded and specified” excavation of Sandy Pearlman’s arcane word-craft. The author approaches Pearlman’s mythos as a mason would a fortress, carefully filling in the mortar between the stones of the castle-keep Pearlman built for the band he managed to worldwide recognition—particularly through Agents of Fortune and Fire of Unknown Origin, works that themselves function as alchemical grimoires.
Readers are invited to “dance the dance of time” alongside Imaginos, the “modified child,” as he shape-shifts through the 19th century, carving rifts in the psychic fabric and inhabiting figures such as Poe, Bierce, Lovecraft, Crowley, Austin Osman Spare—and, in the author’s more reckless speculation, even Winston Churchill.
The volume also features 39 pencil illustrations, several of which have appeared in Albert Bouchard’s lyric videos for “Blue Öyster Cult” and “Black Telescope.”
Supplementing the main text are four appendices:
*Appendix 1: 1919–2020
*Appendix 2: An Interview with Albert Bouchard
*Appendix 3: Wild Child Full of Grace: The Magic Tale of How Imaginos Incarnated as Jim Morrison and Told Sandy Pearlman How He Rose from the Sea to Cause World War I
*Appendix 4: From Aoxomoxoa to Oaxaca
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