From Kensington to the East End, under candlelight, gas lamp and then neon signs, London is both a bustling physical metropolis and a stirring psychic encounter. The most depraved depictions of London in fiction, film, poetry, television and theatre have irrevocably merged with the reality of its dark history, creating a phantasmagoria defined by murder, vice and the unnatural. In this panoptic look at the capital at its most eerie and macabre, Clive Bloom takes a tour of Gothic London's uncanny literature, arcane events and its infamous and imagined geographies.
From David Bowie to T S Eliot, Thomas de Quincey to Aleister Crowley, the prophetess Joanna Southcott to the 'ghosts' of Abba and the worlds of Neil Gaiman and Clive Barker, these are the figures that populate a city lost in fog and blind alleys, where the dead can be raised, the living sacrificed and the clandestine thrive. Suturing together fact and fantasy, London Uncanny presents the urban landscape of the capital as a space of wonder and madness, haunted by its past and haunting the present. Stalking through disease and degeneracy, death and murder, spiritualism, lunacy and the occult, Bloom crafts a singular, integrated concept of a London where dreams and nightmares meet.
From David Bowie to T S Eliot, Thomas de Quincey to Aleister Crowley, the prophetess Joanna Southcott to the 'ghosts' of Abba and the worlds of Neil Gaiman and Clive Barker, these are the figures that populate a city lost in fog and blind alleys, where the dead can be raised, the living sacrificed and the clandestine thrive. Suturing together fact and fantasy, London Uncanny presents the urban landscape of the capital as a space of wonder and madness, haunted by its past and haunting the present. Stalking through disease and degeneracy, death and murder, spiritualism, lunacy and the occult, Bloom crafts a singular, integrated concept of a London where dreams and nightmares meet.
Richer in its findings than double cream at Twinings' 300-year-old teahouse on Strand, incantatory in its prose as sounds of choir at St. Paul's, this journey from pre-eminent Gothic scholar Clive Bloom roams and records his home city of London. He explores with ample evidence why London is an outsider island within the kingdom it administers. Bloom's command for its past and its personalities, and respect for its mystifying nature, is astonishing. On every corner, on every foggy street, something revelatory happened that we did not know, and which changes what we did know regarding the base of Britannia. Prophets and apostates, prostitutes and poets, politicians and psychologists, psychics and pretenders of all stripes - sometimes on the same street - acted or were acted upon, feeding the collective artistic, criminal, paranormal, and intellectual history of London. Not just a guide book, not purely a history of place, this volume is something more: a communion between the London flaneur and this City's surreal and haunting nature. London Uncanny does for the strange past of this Capital's streets what Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere did for its fictional life below them-reveals the secret life. Danel Olson, Chairperson of the Committee for the Bram Stoker Award and author of The Gothic War on Terror author of The Gothic War on Terror