London Uncanny

From Kensington to the East End, under candlelight, gas lamp and then neon signs, London is both a bustling physical metropolis and a stirring psychic encounter. The most depraved depictions of London 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 the 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 David Bowie to T S Eliot, Thomas de Quincey to Aleister Crowley, the prophetess Joanna Southcott to the 'ghosts' of Abba and the worlds of Neil Gaiman and Clive Barker, 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 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.

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.