SOUNDTRACK:
[READ: October 31, 2025] “The Extremophile”
It has been six years since Ghost Box III came out….
After years of demand, the Ghost Box is back! Patton Oswalt’s much-beloved spooky-story anthology returns for a fourth edition, with the same trademark production details—magnetized box lid, anyone?—that Ghost Box fans have come to expect.
As always, working with Patton on Ghost Box IV was a dream, and we can’t wait to show you the nightmares that he’s wrangled and stuffed into the box this time around.
I don’t know very much about Christian Bök except that he wrote the poetry series Eunoia which is a remarkable piece of art and poetry:
Each poem uses only one vowel, creating sentences like: “Hassan can, at a handclap, call a vassal at hand and ask that all staff plan a bacchanal”
It’s worth checking out.
I didn’t know if he did anything since, but apparently he has been working on something called The Xenotext which Wikipedia says
Xenotext consists of a single sonnet (called “Orpheus”), which gets translated into a gene and then integrated into a cell, causing the cell to “read” this poem, and in reply, the cell builds a protein — one whose sequence of amino acids encodes yet another sonnet (called “Eurydice”). The cell becomes not only a durable archive for storing a poem, but also an operant machine for writing a poem. The gene has so far worked properly in cultures of E. coli, but the intended symbiote is D. radiodurans (“the dire seed, immune to radiation”) — an extremophile, able to thrive in very inhospitable environments, deadly to most life on Earth.
I quoted that because it uses the word extremophile, which is the name of this story.
This story is quite short and it is, simply, a list of conditions that this entity can survive in. It’s fascinating but not terribly interesting and, indeed, not very scary. Especially since nothing happens in the story. I mean, the ending is “It awaits your experiments,” which I guess is an interesting setup and given some of that background above it does make it slightly more compelling, but as a story, well, meh.
I Just Read About That... 