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The Coffin of Honey
Close Encounters of the Third Kind meets Annihilation in this poetic space-age fable of proletarian internationalism.
At the end of the twenty-first century, on the shores of the Indian Ocean, a minor Marxist politician’s speech is interrupted by the arrival of an iridescent, pill-shaped object. It brings him, briefly, to another world, and to a state of ecstasy he will struggle to interpret upon his return. Soon, many others will be offered the same incantatory opportunity. Rival states attempt to capitalize on these developments, and a cynical spy sets an elaborate psychological operation in motion. Thousands of miles away, on an agricultural commune near the Caspian Sea, a young poet spends her nights troubled by prophetic dreams. The politician, the spy, and the poet will be ineluctably drawn into one another’s orbits, as will the mysterious Bell Letterist, author of a text about ‘the interdimensional will to the aesthetic’ – a powerful motive force that requires human solidarity in order to thrive.
The Coffin of Honey is inspired equally by apocryphal stories of Alexander the Great, Bolaño-esque tales of literary vanishings, thousand-year-old Persian poems by exiled princesses, and the fever-dream conclusions of every parapolitical conspiracy theory that might just be true.
‘The Coffin of Honey is about revolution, about humanity slowly, inexorably shrugging off the honeyed promises of capitalism … [T]ruly remarkable.’ – Ian Mond, Locus Magazine
‘The Coffin of Honey is a book of Nabokovian complexity that invites re-reading immediately upon completion.’ – Dawn MacDonald, Strange Horizons
‘Morrison brings a delightful tenderness to the strange that makes the many locations of the narrative across the continents all feel warm, and rich, and densely populated.’ – Ben Berman Ghan, Ancillary Review of Books
– Tobias Carroll, Reactor‘Morrison’s text blends historical allusions to paranoid observations; given that the author’s own observations on language make for fascinating reading, the international scope of this book takes on an even more intriguing dimension.’
‘Morrison’s brilliant first novel, Falling Hour, was hard to describe because it’s essentially plotless, the record of one man’s thoughts during the course of a day. His brilliant second one is hard to describe for the opposite reason. The Coffin of Honey features elaborate world-building, conflict between unrepentant Marxists and unbridled capitalists, an alien spacecraft, and apocryphal facts about ancient empires. Among other things. It’s wonderfully, complicatedly good.’ – James Crossley, Leviathan Bookstore
‘Comparative to science fiction, revolution also requires world-building, and like all good leftist thinkers, Morrison is not simply interested in diagnosis, but imagination.’ – Kenna Clifford, The British Columbia Review
– Chris Hall, McNally Robinson‘It’s equal parts of apocryphal stories of Alexander the Great, thousand-year-old poems by exiled princesses … It has fever dream conclusions of every conspiracy theory that might just be true. I dare you to read this.’
‘[A]larming, wondrous speculative…a searing indictment of capitalist destruction wrapped in the pleasures of a first contact tale…The prose is elegant, philosophical, and introspective, though also pocked with reminders of human corruption.’ – Michelle Anne Schingler , Foreword
‘This dense and poetic novel of first contact from Morrison (<em style= color: rgb(17
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Details
Dimensions:
304 Pages
8.5in * 5.5in * 0.75in
0.9lb
Published:
May 12, 2026
Publisher:
ISBN:
9781552455180
Book Subjects:
Featured In:
Language:
eng
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