Alan Moore. Image courtesy Knockabout
Knockabout has announced Alan Moore’s second novel, Jerusalem, will now be published in September 2016.
Described as a fantastical exploration of his hometown of Northampton which runs to more than a million words in draft form, publisher Tony Bennett described it last year as Alan’s “best work to date, rich and glorious”.
In the half a square mile of decay and demolition that was England’s Saxon capital, eternity is loitering between the firetrap tower blocks. Embedded in the grubby amber of the district’s narrative among its saints, kings, prostitutes and derelicts a different kind of human time is happening, a soiled simultaneity that does not differentiate between the petrol-coloured puddles and the fractured dreams of those who navigate them. Fiends last mentioned in the Book of Tobit wait in urine-scented stairwells, the delinquent spectres of unlucky children undermine a century with tunnels, and in upstairs parlours labourers with golden blood reduce fate to a snooker tournament.
Disappeared lanes yield their own voices, built from lost words and forgotten dialect, to speak their broken legends and recount their startling genealogies, family histories of shame and madness and the marvellous. There is a conversation in the thunderstruck dome of St. Paul’s cathedral, childbirth on the cobblestones of Lambeth Walk, an estranged couple sitting all night on the cold steps of a Gothic church-front, and an infant choking on a cough drop for eleven chapters. An art exhibition is in preparation, and above the world a naked old man and a beautiful dead baby race along the Attics of the Breath towards the heat death of the universe.
An opulent mythology for those without a pot to piss in, through the labyrinthine streets and pages of Jerusalem tread ghosts that sing of wealth and poverty; of Africa, and hymns, and our threadbare millennium. They discuss English as a visionary language from John Bunyan to James Joyce, hold forth on the illusion of mortality post-Einstein, and insist upon the meanest slum as Blake’s eternal holy city.
Fierce in its imagining and stupefying in its scope, this is the tale of everything, told from a vanished gutter…
Alan began work on Jerusalem in 2008 and finished his gargantuan draft in September 2014.
Liveright will publish the book in the US, and rights have been sold in several other territories including Italy and Brazil.
Last year, The Guardian suggested that readers looking for further indications of what Jerusalem may hold can turn to his 1996 novel in prose, Voice of the Fire, which is also set in Northampton. Weaving together the stories of 12 different characters over a period of 6,000 years, from a cave-boy to a Roman emissary to a crippled nun, the novel opens in 4000BC.
Tony Bennett says no excerpts are available yet, but the cover will follow in a few weeks and then “some bits from the book” after that.
• Knockabout is online at www.knockabout.com
• Information Update 21st April 2016: Jerusalem is listed to be published on 15th September 2016 in hardback and a three-book slip-case edition, which will be released on 22nd September
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The founder of downthetubes, which he established in 1998. John works as a comics and magazine editor, writer, and on promotional work for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He is currently editor of Star Trek Explorer, published by Titan – his third tour of duty on the title originally titled Star Trek Magazine.
Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine, Babylon 5 Magazine, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics. He has also edited several comic collections, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”.
He’s the writer of “Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies” for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs” with Dave Hailwood.
Categories: Books, British Comics, downthetubes News, Other Worlds
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