London Uncanny: A Gothic Guide to the Capital in Weird History and Fiction

(Hardback)

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From Kensington to the East End, under candle light, gas lamp and then Neon signs, London is both a bustling physical metropolis and a stirring psychic encounter. The most depraved depictions of the city 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 Englands 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 Jack the Ripper, Thomas de Quincey, Aleister Crowley, the prophetess Joanna Southcott, and Johnny 'Rotten' Lydon to Sweeney Todd, Count Dracula, and the characters of Neil Gaimans London Below, 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 allowed to 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.

Reviews

Review of Violent City: 2000 Years of Riots, Rebels and Revolts, 1st edition An exhilarating rush through countless riots, insurrections and full-blown street wars... Written in a racy and accessible style... * JG Ballard in Saturday Telegraph, May 2003 *
Review of Violent City: 2000 Years of Riots, Rebels and Revolts, 2nd edition 'This isn't just a history of riots and revolts: because each disturbance has to be placed in context, this is a political history which is made all the more interesting because it concentrates on the flashpoints, and the events which caused them. ' * The Guardian, 2010 *
Review of Violent City: 2000 Years of Riots, Rebels and Revolts, 2nd edition ' [an] ambitious and erudite chronicle of protest in the capital assiduously researched...' * The Times, 2010 *
Review of Victoria's Madmen 'In Victoria's Madmen, Clive Bloom marshals a crowd of men and women to help him dismantle the myth of Victorian conformity and uniformity. Bloom's 'madmen' include spiritualists and anarchists, atheists and visionaries, socialists, nudists and assassins they all contribute to creating a 19th century wilder and richer than the one we usually encounter' * New Statesman, 2013 *
Review of Victoria's Madmen 'This richly diverse book contains a number of gems it coveys well the bubbling energy of those in the Victorian era who swam against the tide, and many of whose ideas would become the language of counter-cultural modernity' * Times Higher Education, 2013 *
Reviews of Riot City 'A brilliant documentation, analysis and commentary on the recent wave of popular protests - their aims, methods and effects - and how the state has responded to these challenges to its power and authority.' * Peter Tatchell, human rights campaigner, 2012 *
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. Blooms 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 Citys surreal and haunting nature. London Uncanny does for the strange past of this Capitals streets what Neil Gaimans Neverwhere did for its fictional life below themreveals the secret life. * Danel Olson, World Fantasy Judge and author of The Gothic War on Terror *
Spied through a glass darkly, Clive Blooms 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 Londons 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 Blooms 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. *

Author Bio

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.