Thanks to everyone who attended the Dead Ink Halloween takeover on Halloween last night! It was great fun – watching readings from the brilliant Naomi Booth and Lucie McKnight Hardy, reading my story ‘Sky City’ from the newly published London Incognita and answering questions afterwards.
You can watch the whole event here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CG-5jB_FmI3/
A big thanks to everyone who attended the online Instagram launch for London Incognita last Thursday night, hosted wonderfully by Heidi James.
If you don’t know Heidi’s work then I seriously recommend you check out her recent novel The Sound Mirror published by Bluemoose this year.
If you missed it, you can watch the whole event on the Dead Ink Instagram page here:
Delighted to announce that I'm launching LONDON INCOGNITA this week on Instagram, in conversation with the mighty Heidi James (author of the phenomenal The Sound Mirror). Watch two Kentish writers discuss the weird darkness of the capital, and more.
Thursday October 5, 2020, 7pm GMT.
Both the newly published LONDON INCOGNITA, and my first collection HOLLOW SHORES, are now available in Audiobook from, produced by WF Howes!
They are available to buy via Audible- click on the links below.
LONDON INCOGNITA is published today by Dead Ink!!
Late-capitalist urban weird fiction about the most exciting and horrifying of places - London.
About the book:
London Incognita chronicles a city caught in the cycle of perpetual decline and continuous renewal: the English capital, groaning under the weight of two-thousand years of history, as seen through the eyes of its desperate and troubled inhabitants. A malicious presence from the 1970s resurfaces in the fevered alleyways of the city; an amnesiac goddess offers brittle comfort to the spirits of murdered shop-girls; and an obscure and forgotten London writer holds the key to a thing known as the emperor worm. As bombs detonate and buildings burn down, the citys selfish inhabitants hunt the ghosts of friends, family and lovers to the urban limits of the metropolis, uncovering the dark secrets of London.
Paperback: https://deadinkbooks.com/product/london-incognita-pre-order/
Audiobook: https://audible.co.uk/pd/London-Incognita-Audiobook/1004019424
I can see where it began to unravel. That summer; the one the whole country remembers. I was twenty-five-years-old, the tarmac of London oozing in the heat. Hotter than Spain, screamed the headlines. Much flesh on display.
The city was burning. Five night of riots, triggered by something so common we’d almost all forgotten it was a travesty. The police choked a young black lad squeezed the life out of him, as they’d done to so many before. It was out Wood Green way.
PK and I had taken our fair share of batterings out on the demos, and Andy once took a beating in the cells of Stoke Newington for having too much of a mouth on him. But we considered ourselves lucky – we put ourselves in those situations. I see that now. The police didn’t come looking for us.
For whatever reason, people weren’t having it that summer. Who can blame them. Push people too far, then punish them for having the gall to react – the sheer nerve of it. The put-upon of London reacted with torched squad cars, bricks through the windows of Currys, looting all those things they were told they needed to be a proper person, but could not afford.
Petrol bombs burst on riot shields, a gorgeous, compelling and frightening sight. The memories of London streets lit at night by oily flame, so beautiful. Rip it up, tear it down, smash, start again. If only it had been that way.
Even back then I knew the violence, the unhappiness and unrest, was nothing new to London. This ancient city, my home, a place I knew like one of its rats, eking life out in the cracks and gaps. I had this… what’d you call a gift. A gift that isolated me.
I could see the ghosts of the all the cities London had been. I’d often catch glimpses of men and women in outdated clothing, and wonder. It was so hard to tell who was living and who was dead – with retro fashion booming, second-hand chic a thing, even skinhead fashion suffering a fashionable re-appreciation, how could I tell when anyone was from? And who was I, anyway, to pass judgment on this? Whether I was decked out, like I was back then, in the black and white t-shirts of bands from the early eighties, or smartened up in polo shirts, when the hell was I from? I burned with nostalgia for times that never really happened.
The weight of the city I lived in crushed me. I couldn’t verbalise it. It was a drug. I’d sit and watch old Pogues videos, flick through my shelves of London fiction, stare out high as a kite over the view from London Bridge at five am as the sun came up, and the knowledge of where I was, what this city was and the fact that I lived in it – I lived in it – became unbearable. Like a pill you’d taken that you knew was too strong, with the rush of emotions feeling enough to buckle me at the spine. I never knew what to call those feelings. Some kind of extra, unnecessary, sensitivity.
I saw the spriggan on Parkland Walk struggling to get free of the brickwork when no one else could; I knew the golem in Stamford Hill was real. I studied the tarot, I loved weird fiction, and took an interest in things like the collective unconscious. I had taken mushrooms, acid, even DMT down on the south coast in Hastings, an experience which almost made me believe in an afterlife.
That night as the city burned, we thought we’d nose out what was going on, try and live up to some of the creeds we claimed to adhere to. I can still see Jess, in her light denim jacket with covered in patches promoting causes that mattered in those days, plain black T shirt, hair shaved along one side of the head like the girls used to do back then. It was before we really got together, and way before it all turned to shit.
We were running down a side road off the Green Lanes, fleeing it as a whole unit of riot police done up like a dystopian enforcers marched down the street. Turks and kurds leaning out of their windows above the kebab shops and grocery stores. I have a memory of a tipped-over box of Turkish peppers, those pale green ones your cook up with eggs in a metal pan, arranged like an absurd, crushed corona on the tarmac
Some of the Turks were out on the street, tooled up with cleavers and bats that should have been hitting softballs in London’s parks. They were a community that knew how to look after themselves, and I always respected them for that. They were defending their property from the looters, people we presumed they knew as neighbours.
We ran down the alley as the Green Lanes went up in flames and came down in smashed glass and scorched brick. Jess and I had lost the others, and it felt like we were in theold Alex Cox movie, Sid & Nancy, excited and adrenalised by the fact that things were happening and for once the status quo was wobbling. We kissed in the shadow behind a green industrial recycling bin, a piece of smouldering cardboard wafting above us like a burning angel.
I hope that everyone has had a great Christmas and is looking forward to an exciting 2019! 2018 has been a busy year.
I have received good news, and that is that I am lucky enough to have received an Author’s Foundation grant from the Society of Authors, allowing me time to write and focus on the various projects I have planned for the coming year. This makes an enormous difference, so I cannot state how grateful I am to have received this. In addition to the funding received from Arts Council England for Influx Press, it marks a real step forward.
Today I went for a long walk from Enfield Town into the strangely hermetic upper middle class enclave of Winchmore Hill, complete with village green, and into the gorgeous Grovelands Park that led me eventually to the 1930s modernist architecture of Southgate underground station, and back home through Oakwood Park. London, as ever, continues to surprise and confound me, feeling almost infinite in its scope. It seems appropriate, then, that I was given the Tartarus Press edition The London Adventure, or The Art of Wandering by Arthur Machen as a gift for Christmas. Indeed, it was reading the introduction to that book that made me decide to explore a new, unknown area within easy distance of where I live. This section in particular reminded me of the joy of exploring London’s margins and unloved areas:
The great city both conceals and reveals a rich diversity of marvels for those who would seek them. Machen makes it clear, though, that such treasures are not to be discovered through the use of guidebooks – the great, noble and notorious landmarks of London, be they historical or literary, can be easily visited and appreciated by anyone who can read a map. But it is off the tourists’ beaten track that the really awe-inspiring and awful matters of London can be found, or can, at least, be hinted at. And just as they are often only glimpsed at the corner of the eye, or are realised after the event, they are always stumbled upon by chance.
‘There is a writhing worm in all of us, waiting to be freed.’
– From The Salvage Song of the Larks, and Other Stories, by Michael Ashman
I have a story in the latest Coffin Bell Journal that you can read here.
Here is a reading of my story 'A Constellation of Wondrous Places', filmed in Morden Library as part of my City of Stories residency. I am running workshops in Merton on the 12th and 19th of June – all the info here!
Lightning storms above London. 26/5/18. Photo by Nina Simona.
Sustain us when we fall.
Read MoreI see deformed and furred mastodons on the ice of Doggerland, and I have recurring visions of a blind creator god jerking its arms out towards me by a deserted stretch of the New River Path in the cold days of February. There is too much of London for me to see now, as busy as a work of Hogarth’s, as terrifying as the violent and lonely nights the inmates of Bedlam must have endured.
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