Alan Moore has a new novel out! The Great When is the first installment of the writer's planned five volume fantasy saga, The Long London, and it's terrific: a blackly comic jaunt through post-WW2 London and a mysterious parallel reality that's as bafflingly strange as it is hilarious. Now, in a new interview for SFX magazine, Moore has revealed details of the second volume – including its title.
The Great When takes place in 1949 and follows young Dennis Knuckleyard as he comes into possession of a mysterious book that really shouldn't exist at all. The sequel is set a decade later, in 1959, and will be titled I Hear A New World. It's named after a famous – and famously bizarre – 1960 album by record producer Joe Meek. As with The Great When, which sees Dennis cross paths with various strange characters both fictional and real, Meek will also feature in the novel. "He's an absolute gift as a character," Moore told SFX. "Once I got that Gloucester accent down pat, then I started to have an awful lot of fun writing Joe."
Elsewhere in the interview, Moore talked about his upcoming and long-awaited The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic – a guide to the occult that was co-written with the late Steve Moore (no relation), and illustrated by a swathe of fantastic artists, including the late Kevin O'Neill, John Coulthart, Steve Parkhouse, Rick Veitch and Ben Wickey. The lavish hardback also includes Alan Moore's final works in comics.
"It's a book that means an awful lot to me," Moore said of the tome, which is published next week by Knockabout. "I hope that we've been as lucid as it is possible to be. We've tried to make a book that people, if they were told 'There's this big book of magic', whether they're nine or 90, they'd perhaps somehow imagined it to be this book. That was our intention."
You can read the full interview in the current issue of SFX, which is available from all good (and some evil) newsagents now, and which features Terrifier 3 on the cover. It can also be bought digitally via MagazinesDirect. Just click on the down arrow next to "rolling subscription" and select the "single issue" option.
The Great When by Alan Moore is out now from Bloomsbury. The Moon And Serpent Bumper Book of Magic is published by Knockabout on October 17.
Last year we published an in-depth discussion with Alan Moore about his thoughts on superheroes and finally leaving comics behind.
