About the Book
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.
Table of Contents:
List of Contents
Chapter 1 Edgar Poe in Starbucks ©
Chapter 2 Fumbles in the Fog
Chapter 3 Bowie with a Zebra
Chapter 4 Chat Show Vampires
Chapter 5 Shock and Awe in Anglican Land
Chapter 6 Perverts in the Suburbs
Chapter 7 Joanna has a Baby, Ernest offers a Potato
Chapter 8 Cenobites in Dollis Hill: Intermezzo
Chapter 9 Mysteries at the Bloomberg Building
Chapter 10 ABBA meets the Poltergeist
Chapter 11 Crowley and the Beetle
Chapter 12 Tom Eliot gets the Hoo Haas
Chapter 13 Charles Dickens does not eat Pies
Chapter 14 Mary Barnes paints her picture
Chapter 15 Florence Farr chats with a Mummy
Chapter 16 Mabel Collins entertains Guests
Chapter 17 Mother Sawyer puts a Spell on You
Chapter 18 The Invisible Man goes Shopping
Chapter 19 Dr Zerrfi's Faustian Pact
Chapter 20 Satan takes a stroll with the Bellman
Chapter 21 Gilbert and George have a Take Away
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Clive Bloom is Professor in Residence at the Larkin Centre for Poetry and Creative Writing at Hull University, UK; Emeritus Professor at Middlesex University, UK; Research Fellow at New York University, USA and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Western Timisoara, Romania. A feature writer for The Financial Times, The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Irish Times and the London Evening Standard, Bloom is the author of many books on topics from literature to politics, including the political histories of London Violent City and Riot City. He has won a Bram Stoker Award, been shortlisted for a World Fantasy Award twice and is editor of series on crime and the Gothic for multiple publishing house. An international key note speaker he has given addresses to the Association of Forensic Psychiatrists and Gresham College, jointly curated two exhibitions, on Jack the Ripper and the Siege of Sidney Street at the Museum of London and has advised the British Cabinet Office on publish disorder issues.
Review :
Clive Bloom is the perfect guide to London's uncanny, gothic side … [He] takes us wherever his mind takes him, which makes for some twisty-turny paths indeed … At times, Bloom's ability to draw connections between different phenomena, between different parts of the city, is itself uncanny.
Eclectic and pleasantly disorientating.
London Uncanny is a fascinating journey through the stranger byways of the capital, as depicted through literature, and embodied in many of its most fascinating inhabitants, from David Bowie and Alesteir Crowley to TS Eliot and even the 'ghosts' of ABBA. It's an engrossing, sometimes dizzying, ride, full of hidden surprises and insights.
From Poe to ABBA's spectral presence, from Spring-heeled Jack to Crowley to the Highgate Vampire, [there is] much to fascinate in this guide to London's weird and dreamy underside.
Engaging, strange and suitably mind-altering.
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...
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.
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!
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.
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.
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'
