London Uncanny

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, World Fantasy Judge and author of The Gothic War on Terror *
Spied through a glass darkly, Clive Bloom’s compelling and unique vision of London is revealed to be an uncanny space and cityscape of the weird. In this alternative guide, he will lead you to where the fog is thickest, a portal to an upside-down world of fantastic imaginings, eccentrics past and present, spooks and spiritualists and to the heart of an inner darkness. After reading this scintillating book, London will never be the same again! * Professor Marie Mulvey-Roberts, author of Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal, winner of the Allan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize *
Clive Bloom has long been one of the U.K.'s principal authorities on the Gothic, and this study of the uncanny and the eldritch in London’s past combines an ironclad historicity with a storyteller's grip. The book functions on a variety of levels in consummate fashion, and the writing style is immensely readable. Readers are unlikely to view the Capital and its eerie past in the same way ever again... * Barry Forshaw, The Financial Times Literature Critic British Crime Film/Crime Fiction: A Reader's Guide/Sex and Film/Italian Cinema/Film Noir/British Gothic Cinema/Crime Time/DVD Choice *
Clive Bloom’s London Uncanny: A Gothic Guide to the Capital in Weird Fiction, is, like the city itself, a phantasmagoria of shifting visions and twilight dreams, strange turnings and even stranger encounters. A born and bred Londoner who knows the capital well, Bloom leads the reader into territories and neighbourhoods that are at once unknown yet disturbingly familiar, laying out a map of the unexpected drawn over very well-trodden ground. Where else might David Bowie, Aleister Crowley, Charles Dickens, Dracula, Gilbert and George, Jack the Ripper and other inhabitants of this engrossing work meet, but in the thick soup of a London fog? As packed with mysteries as the Old Smoke itself, London Uncanny is psychogeography at its best, and Bloom a consummate tour guide. * Gary Lachman is a former member of Blondie and author of Aleister Crowley: Magic, Rock and Roll and the Wickedest Man in the World. *
Mixing bygone esoterica and deviance with pop culture and a dash of theory, Bloom reveals London as both anarchic and haunted, a landscape of the uncanny at large where Spring-Heeled Jack terrorizes the suburbs, Derrida meets Kipling, and Abba perform as spectral simulacra of themselves. Highly readable, this is a compendium of dodgy enchantments: a cabinet of narrative curiosities. * Phil Baker, Occult biographer and author of City of the Beast: The London of Aleister Crowley. *
You will never see London the same way again … after following in Bloom’s uncovering of the uncanny a series of spirit-shaped plaques adorning buildings throughout the city came into vision. This book is spookily joyful’ * Rachel Kolsky, London tour guide and author of Jewish London *