Season of the Witch: The Book of Goth

'A FREAKING MASTERPIECE!' -- Lydia Lunch
'Cathi Unsworth not only succeeds in conjuring her personal history and dark tastes into a book of immense and lucid insight, but in doing so has crafted a rich reflection on the signs and sigils of the times, taking in - as well as using - associated cultural ritual and alchemy, featuring a cast of the lost, the damned, the beautiful and the bizarre; the possessed and dispossessed. All with the best possible sense of glacial cool.' -- Richard Cabut (ne: Richard North)
''Season Of The Witch' is to Goth what Jon Savage's 'England's Dreaming' was to Punk... a magnificent, wild dissection of the music, the madness, and social dysfunction of the era that spawned it. Hail Unsworth.' -- Billy Chainsaw (former Siouxsie and The Banshees’ personal assistant)
'Drawing on both her novelistic skills as well as her years as a music journalist, Unsworth's account of Goth and its origins is rich and absorbing, establishing its political and historical context (with Margaret Thatcher as the most infamous dominatrix of all). She shows that the dark matter of Goth amounts to more than mere Addams family cosplay but has deep cultural roots in literature and cinema, as well as magnificent precursors such as The Doors, Nico, Suicide, David Bowie, who helped breed giants such as Siouxsie & The Banshees, The Cure, Joy Division and Magazine.' -- David Stubbs
'CREATURES, FIENDS, FRIENDS OF THE NIGHT AND OF THE NORTH, ACCEPT NO ALTERNATIVES: THIS IS THE BOOK WE'VE BEEN WAITING FOR OUR WHOLE REAL, TRUE GOTH LIVES.' -- David Peace
'Cathi brings darkness to light.' -- Jon Savage
'An utterly compelling social history filled with passion, sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. This is the essential account of all things Goth, the epic and intimate story of a great tribe that emerged from Thatcher's Dark Ages.' -- JAKE ARNOTT
'The First Lady of Noir seamlessly stitches politics, psychogeography and secret history into the most mesmerising musical tapestry of the Eighties, to create a Gothic masterpiece. I was spellbound.' -- Ann Scanlon
'Cathi Unsworth's Season of the Witch is a panoramic view of the musical culture of the UK in the 1980s and its search for a voice to capture - a voice sometimes captured by - a nation seized by traumas of displacement, dispossession, depression, powerlessness, and silencing. But for all the twists and turns of the music whose tales make the body of the book, what both grounds it, and opens a period of time now in the past as a gaping hole waiting as the future, is the constant underpinning of the greater Goth forces at work in the land, the true lords of mendacity, cruelty, and domination: Rupert Murdoch and Margaret Thatcher. ". . . once again able to feast on those who would destroy her," Unsworth writes - and for all the adventures of bands from Siouxie and the Banshees to Sisters of Mercy, that is the most Goth line in the book.' -- Greil Marcus
'A beautifully written, meticulously researched account. 4/5.' -- Classic Pop
'A superb history of the dark and all its risings. It's as monumental as its subject, a real temple of love. 4/5.' -- Mojo
'Even for those not drawn to the goth flame it's a brilliant piece of cultural history.' -- Choice Magazine