Another thing I feel like I say a lot: zine is a sort of meaningless term, interchangeable with chapbook and booklet and probably other words that all refer to the same basic format. I think for a lot of folks “zine” implies photocopied and chapbook means “really nice paper” and I am usually dismissive of these sorts of taxonomies. However! I have a bunch of publications (both real and, courtesy of the HP Lovecraft Historical Society, fake), dedicated to short monographs on different historical subjects or artifacts. These are formal looking, are printed on fancy paperstock and just feel, well, academic in their presentation. They’re still essentially zines, but also somewhat different. Tyler Vance’s Void (2021) feels of a kind with those.

Void: Records from the Frontier 001 is a world building exercise consisting of six of Vance’s gorgeously strange, fossil-like paintings accompanied by brief vignettes. Taken together, the reader/viewer should begin to cobble together some facts—there is a Void, people go in, sometimes they don’t come out, sometimes they come out carrying things with them. I don’t want to pollute your potential experience with my notions, so I will mostly leave it at that, but I find it and its sequel volumes wonderfully meditative and evocative. (OK, a little more: Stalker, Annihilation and Gibson’s short story “Hinterlands” are all touchstone for my reactions to Void).

I think it is well known that I like these sorts of no-system world-building projects (A Thousand Thousand Islands, Rainy City, Lodestar to Karamouska), but I like that this goes one step farther and, aside of the artist’s statement at the front, it feels like an in-universe artifact, a catalog for some strange museum exhibit, an auction book, a secret black market log. Volume Two has similar vibes and oh man, Volume Three, A Young Person’s Introduction to Erratics, takes things in a fantastic new direction (that is pretty clearly signposted by the title). It will pull you even further into this strange underground.

Grab all three from his store. You won’t be sorry!