Having managed to finish the advance copy just in time, I called up Moore (he’s not online), to discuss the upcoming title, a conversation that – true to form – got strange quickly.
#EASY WRITER BEDFORD SERIES#
In 2021, Bloomsbury acquired two book projects from Moore: a five-volume fantasy series (which he says he’s “about halfway through '') and Illuminations, a book of collected short stories which drops next month.
In 2016, he published Jerusalem, a genre-bending, 1,266 page ‘cosmic epic’ about Northampton complete with ghosts, pool-playing angels, and a sexual encounter between Dusty Springfield and a hospital-bound Lucia Joyce written in the impenetrable style of Finnegans Wake.
He’s recently taken to producing ambitious literary tomes. Like the court scientists of old, Moore’s output has an alchemical quality to it, fusing elements of mysticism, William Burroughs-esque squalid modernism, theoretical physics, psychogeography, historical fiction and Lovecraftian fantasy. V’s Guy Fawkes mask, for example, became the face of anti-establishment movements like Anonymous and Occupy Wall Street while Alexandria Ocasio Cortez once quoted Watchmen’s masked anti-hero, Rorschach, as a warning to congressional colleagues, “I’m not locked up in here with YOU. This formal shift to magic has come to define much of his work, particularly as so many of his creations seem to have conjured themselves into the real world. On his 40th birthday, he declared himself a ‘ceremonial magician’ and turned to worshipping a second-century Roman snake god named Glycon. Moore retired from comics in 2019 following disagreements with film studios which saw him removing his name from blockbuster remakes of his work. When scoffingly asked in an interview, “oh you just write comics?” Moore once replied, “well you wouldn’t have said to Stravinsky that he just did music…” Titles like V for Vendetta (1982), Swamp Thing (1983), Watchmen (1986), The Killing Joke (1988) and From Hell (1989) came out in such rapid succession as to suggest some kind of unholy Faustian pact (not entirely off-brand for Moore). If anything, ‘success’ was an understatement for a man who had essentially re-invented the comic book in just over seven years. “I’m a comic book messiah for the 1990s,” a young, but no less bearded Moore once described himself in documentary for ITV, “and having risen from my humble terrace street origins and having survived my tenure as one of the dole queue millions I’ve now become a successful small businessman of no mean repute, and I believe that this is the face of success in Mrs Thatcher’s Britain”. In the centuries that followed, the rich vein of mystic British visionaries continued from William Blake to Aleister Crowley and Austin Osman Spare, snaking its way to the poverty-stricken Boroughs of Northampton where, in 1953, Alan Moore was born. Indeed, in 1583, that’s just what happened to the home of John Dee who had, earlier that year, set off to Poland with the occultist Edward Kelly on the instruction of beings he’d politically termed ‘angels’. Five hundred years ago we’d probably have burned him.
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