A wonderful collection, brilliant and often moving ... Both mind-expanding and cosmic while utterly rooted in our urban reality'' NEIL GAIMAN ''One of the great fiction minds of his generation'' ROLLING STONE In his first-ever short story collection, which spans forty years of work and features many never-before-published pieces, international bestselling author and legendary creator of From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and other modern classics, Alan Moore, presents nine stories full of wonder and strangeness, each taking us deeper into the fantastical underside of reality.
In A Hypothetical Lizard, two concubines in a brothel for fantastical specialists fall in love, with tragic ramifications. In Not Even Legend, a paranormal study group is infiltrated by one of the otherworldly beings they seek to investigate. In Illuminations, a nostalgic older man decides to visit a seaside resort from his youth and finds the past all too close at hand. And in the monumental novella What We Can Know About Thunderman, which charts the surreal and Kafkaesque history of the comics industry over the last seventy-five years through several sometimes-naive and sometimes-maniacal people rising and falling on its career ladders, Moore reveals the dark, beating heart of the superhero business.
From ghosts and otherworldly creatures to theoretical Boltzmann brains fashioning the universe at the big bang, Illuminations is exactly that - a series of bright, startling tales from a contemporary legend that reveal the full power of imagination and magic.
''One of the most significant fiction writers in English ... Moore''s influence can be felt everywhere-in our literature, on our screens, in our politics'' GUARDIAN
A dark and beguiling tour through the streets of a magical London by the Sunday Times bestselling master of modern fantasy, Alan Moore
The year is 1949, the city London. Dennis Knuckleyard is a hapless eighteen-year-old who works and lives in a second-hand bookstore. One day, on an errand to retrieve rare books, Dennis discovers that one of them does not exist. It is a fictitious book, yet it is physically there in his hands nonetheless. How? It comes from the Great When, a dark and magical version of the city that is beyond time. There, epochs blend and realities and unrealities blur. If Dennis does not take this book back to the other London, he will be killed.
So begins a journey delving deep into the city''s occult underbelly and tarrying with an eccentric cast of sorcerers, gangsters, and murderers, many of whom have their own nefarious intentions. Soon Dennis finds himself at the center of an explosive series of events that may alter and endanger both Londons.
Mystical, magnificently written and hilarious, The Great When is Moore''s most imaginative work yet and the first in the fantastic new Long London series.>
A dark and beguiling tour through the streets of a magical London by the Sunday Times bestselling master of modern fantasy, Alan Moore
The year is 1949, the city London. Dennis Knuckleyard is a hapless eighteen-year-old who works and lives in a second-hand bookstore. One day, on an errand to retrieve rare books, Dennis discovers that one of them does not exist. It is a fictitious book, yet it is physically there in his hands nonetheless. How? It comes from the Great When, a dark and magical version of the city that is beyond time. There, epochs blend and realities and unrealities blur. If Dennis does not take this book back to the other London, he will be killed.
So begins a journey delving deep into the city''s occult underbelly and tarrying with an eccentric cast of sorcerers, gangsters, and murderers, many of whom have their own nefarious intentions. Soon Dennis finds himself at the center of an explosive series of events that may alter and endanger both Londons.
Mystical, magnificently written and hilarious, The Great When is Moore''s most imaginative work yet and the first in the fantastic new Long London series.>
