Alan Moore
Trade Paperback
Otago Daily Times, September 12th 2026
Like Ben Aaranovich’s Rivers of London on meth, Britain’s capital is a central character in Alan Moore’s dark fantasy series. For beneath the surface of the contemporary city of the novel is Long London, an accretion of centuries of story and time superimposed upon one another in constant flux: “a continuously shuffled hand of urban surfaces, smooth asphalt blistering to cobbles, concrete, and materials not yet invented before it collapses down to duckboards, to a dirt path, to a trampled indentation in the momentary grass…stories of precarious housing wavering to each side of [London Bridge’s} length, with revolutions blazing there between…. moment ghosts of relatively recent vintage, ragged cyphers echoing from the seventeenth century or later, lightermen and pauper watermen, fish-market bantereens with gibbet jewellery strung across their aprons.”
Its inhabitants are just as fantastical and disturbing, not to mention the source of some terrible puns: The City Heads are just that – jars containing the remains of London’s most famous decapitees, from William Wallace and Anne Bolyn to the Cromwells, while the Prime Monster (who governs from Worstminster) is a slime-mould amalgamation of Prime Ministers past and present). Even the infrastructure is, in places, both sentient and carnivorous. Then there the Arcana, emergent beings of symbol and association, who are a law unto themselves and “most usually [signify] trouble on an previously unimagined scale.”
This other London keeps it existence a closely guarded secret, items and entities occasionally travel between the two cities. And although ‘ordinary’ folk tend to emerge from these encounters mad or dead, the occasional person manages to survive more-or-less unscathed. One such is Dennis Knuckleyard, whose accidental acquisition of a book from the shadow London and its perilous return are the subject of the first novel in the series. It is now 1958 and Dennis, who is now 27, has spent the last 9 years putting those nightmarish events out of his mind. He, however, has not been forgotten, and when a new series of incursions threaten both Londons, he is summoned by the aforementioned City Heads to investigate. To make matters worse Dennis, a reluctant and ineffectual hero at the best of times, rather suspects the problems might be his fault…
It is unsurprising that Moore, best known as a visual artist, should attempt to create a similar depth of effect in his writing and he revels in language: The devil is given 11 different epithets during his brief, 7-page appearance; bodies and their various excrescences and violences are described in visceral detail. Even the sex scenes are more concerned with verbal efflorescence than titillation. It is a linguistic tour-de-force. But as words and images pile one upon the other in an unrelenting barrage it soon becomes exhausting, an effect amplified by font and type-setting that delivers page after page of cramped text with nary a paragraph break.
The world he has created is memorable indeed, but the Long London novels are not for the fainthearted. You have been warned.