What I'm Reading: The Great When by Alan Moore
Alan Moore needs little introduction to anyone with an interest in the darker edges of popular culture — From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the vast and extraordinary Jerusalem, which I read last year and had to take a break twice, being somewhere in the region of a thousand pages. He lives in Northampton, is a practicing ceremonial magician, and co-founded The Moon and Serpent, a private magical order with fellow writer Steve Moore. He declared himself a magician on his 40th birthday in 1993 and famously worships Glycon, a Roman snake deity that was exposed as a 2nd-century hoax — though Moore acknowledges this while maintaining the practice. Now that's a proper post-modern magic(k).
Moore has always had a psychogeographical sensibility (probably why I like him) — the treatment of places as living presences, as characters in themselves — and in that he belongs loosely alongside Iain Sinclair and Michael Moorcock. There is an interesting (for me) Hawkwind connection running through all three: Moore interviewed the band as a young journalist, and Moorcock was long associated with them. Nik Turner made him a cup of tea. I wish I had been there.
The Great When is the first volume of what turns out to be a quintet, the Long London series, and is a period piece set in 1949. The central conceit is from the same territory as China Miéville's The City and the City: two versions of London coexist. Short London is the grimy, post-war city of ration books and bomb damage. Long London is its mythopoeic counterpart — archetypal, chaotic, dangerous — and everything in Short London has its prototype there, in something close to a Platonic relationship, though the forms in question are not transcendent ideals but rather horrific originals.
The protagonist is Dennis Knuckleyard, a hapless eighteen-year-old who works in a second-hand bookshop and stumbles across a book that cannot exist — a fictitious title that appears only within another novel, yet here is the physical object in his hands. This is the MacGuffin, and Moore is working within a tradition he knows well: the evil tome, the manuscript that should not be, that runs from M.R. James through Lovecraft and beyond. Arthur Machen appears in the book as a ghost. Austin Osman Spare, the original chaos magician, walks through the narrative as a living figure. The opening scene places the aged Aleister Crowley alongside Dion Fortune — both alumni of the Golden Dawn who went their separate ways — talking in a Hastings boarding-house garden, and it is pretty darn good.
Moore's prose is ornate and unashamed of it. He is not of the Hemingway school, no sir; the language reaches for beauty, jokes, quips, a florid pleasure in its own texture. I found this mostly a delight. The flavour of the thing reminded me at times of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere — that particular strain of whimsical Englishness, jokey and referential rather than purely sinister — and also, of Terry Pratchett and then of Syd Barrett's early Pink Floyd lyrics, and some of early Genesis (the band) (Trick of the Tail): that quirky, sidelong, quintessentially English surrealism.
I should say that I have not quite finished it as I write this. It is, in the end, a ripping yarn with Alan Moore's distinctive seasoning, which suits me well. I am looking forward to seeing where the series goes.
True? Weirdness
The Thing in the Hedgerow
Ireland — date and location unknown
This account comes from the Fairy Census, an ongoing academic project run by folklorist Simon Young, which has been collecting first-person supernatural encounter reports since 2014. You can visit the Fairy Census website (https://www.fairycensus.com/)
The witness is anonymous and the precise location and date are not recorded — standard practice for the Census, which prioritises confidentiality over specificity. The account is Irish, rural, and almost certainly from within the last thirty years, though we cannot be more precise than that.
The witness was walking home alone at night along a country road when a rustling began in the hedgerow to their right. Being country-bred, they put it down to a badger or fox out hunting — until they noticed that the rustling was matching their pace exactly. When they slowed, it slowed. When they quickened, so did whatever was moving alongside them in the dark.
At a gap in the hedge the rustling transferred without interruption to the other side of the road and continued to keep pace for another half mile. Then, where the hedgerow thinned to barbed wire and sparse foliage at roughly shoulder height, the witness turned their head and saw, blotting out the stars, a shape approximately three feet tall, bulky at the waist and wide at the shoulders, standing quite still. Whether it was looking at them, they could not tell. They ran the last mile home and collapsed through the door. Their older brother, who was still up, said afterwards that their hair was standing on end.
What makes this account worth passing on is precisely what it lacks. There are no wings, no unearthly glow, no convenient folkloric costume to wrap it in. There is only a shape that had been following someone down a dark road, that matched them step for step, and that stopped and stood there among the stars without explanation or apology. The Fairy Census treats its submissions with academic rigour — Simon Young makes no claims about the reality of what witnesses report, but he does vouch for the sincerity of the reporting. This person encountered something, or believed they did, and came home shaken enough that someone else could see it on them. No explanation was offered, and none was claimed, which is perhaps the most unsettling detail of all.
My Own Weird Encounter
That story reminded me of when I was seven or eight years old, playing alone in a wood near where we lived in High Harrington in West Cumbria. In those days you just went out and played on your own and nobody worried, and you came home for your tea. It was summer, I'm fairly sure of that, because what made the game so appealing was a curtain of leaves hanging down from the branches at the far end of a fallen tree.
The game was simple. You climbed up onto the trunk, walked to the end, pushed through the curtain of leaves and jumped off, then went round and did it again. Why not? I was 8. I'd done it probably a dozen times when I pushed through the leaves and found something standing there.
It was taller than me — about the height of a man, though everything looks bigger when you're eight. It was green, completely featureless, and the closest thing I can compare it to, even now, is a courgette (zucchini) standing upright. It had no face, no limbs that I could make out, nothing. It wasn't moving. But I knew, with the absolute certainty that children sometimes have about these things, that it was not a tree or a plant, that it was aware of me, and that it could move if it wanted to. It simply chose not to.
I ran home and didn't go back into that wood on my own for a long time. When I eventually did, I never saw it again. When I mentioned it at school some of the other children claimed they'd seen it too, but I think they were just saying so to be cool like me.
Date: summer, approximately 1968 or 1969. Location: woodland off Scaw Road, High Harrington, Cumbria. Witness: the author. Explanation: I have none.
Once in a Haunted House — Volume 2 is out now
The second issue of the Classic Ghost Stories zine is here, and this one has a theme. Folk horror — not the kind with monsters and jump scares, but the older, quieter kind, where the landscape stops being background and starts being something else entirely. Ten stories and essays about what happens when a place reasserts itself.
A woman makes a pact with a mouse. A walker finds his map no longer quite describes where he is. A fossil collector brings something home from a remote shoreline that perhaps shouldn't have made the journey. These are the kinds of stories that stay with you because they don't quite explain themselves.
There's also film criticism from Jasper L'Estrange in his column The Cutting Room, and a full list of contributors who have produced, I think, something genuinely good.
You can get your copy at the link below. But do order before the 15th of June, as I'll be away in North Wales after that and fulfilment will therefore be slow.
