Fallen London & the Correspondence

Failbetter's underground London and its sea. At its centre is the Correspondence: a language whose written characters are hot to the touch, injure the eye, and can set the incautious reader on fire.

A wholly invented system that lands, without borrowing, on the oldest idea in the house it never visited. Letters that are not symbols but things, with power and danger in them — that is the Sefer Yetzirah's premise, and the golem's, and the reason the tradition surrounds the Name with so much procedure. Failbetter appears to have arrived at it by asking what would be frightening. A convergence, marked as one.