Alan Moore has signed a five-volume epic fantasy series, as well as a collection of short fiction with Bloomsbury. According to The Guardian, the six-figure deal will kick off with Illuminations (the collection of short fiction in fall 2022), and will be followed by the Long London quintet, which the publisher describes as a “dazzlingly original and brimming with energy” of beguiling and elegantly crafted tales that reveal the full power of imagination and magic.”
Moore is famous for his work as a comic book author, particularly for his comics Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Batman: The Killing Joke, Swamp Thing, and others, and in 2019, retired from the medium after wrapping up The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. His career in comics was famously tempestuous: he’s just as well known for his dislike of adaptations of his work, and of his disagreements with companies like DC Comics, and he’s worked independently for a number of years.
Over the years, he’s branched out into prose as well: in 1996, he wrote a millennia-spanning novel called Voice of the Fire, and in 2016, published Jerusalem, a lengthy story (1,266 pages!) set in Northampton. With comics behind him, it looks as though Moore has big plans in prose fiction.
According to The Guardian, the series will begin in London 1949 to a “a version of London just beyond our knowledge” over those five volumes. The first installment will hit stores in 2024. In a statement, Moore says that he’s “bursting with fiction, bursting with prose” and that he “couldn’t be happier with the new home that I’ve found at Bloomsbury: a near-legendary independent publisher with a spectacular list and a fierce commitment to expanding the empire of the word.”
Photo “Alan Moore speaking at TAM London 2010” by Gaius Cornelius used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Those are a long way off, but may actually come out before one or two other famously tardy fantasy series. The publisher’s description is generic and doesn’t really say anything beyond platitudes.
I’ll probably be open to checking out the series when it does roll around. I tried reading Jerusalem, but abandoned it. The weight of description, or pure wordiness, was too much. Some of it read as if he was still writing a comics script, telling the artist what to include in the panels on the page. While that works in a visual medium, where your eye can pass over such detail, page after page of focusing on minute detail, like detritus on a street, or the pattern on a little girl’s barrette, is way too much.
Hopefully, that’s not the style we’ll see in these books. Sometimes less is more. Page count or word count is not the problem. Density for it’s own sake is.
@Sunspear if you still have your copy of Jerusalem, go back and give it another crack. So maybe you didn’t read the whole thing. Just read the part with the Dead Dead Gang, the children of the afterlife. Absolutely delightful!
i’m actually pretty excited by this news. I wasn’t familiar with the graphic novels, but I really enjoyed Jerusalem. This despite a particularly egregious rape scene in it. I mean if you want to talk about the trope about a female character gaining wisdom and experience by way of sexual assault, ugh, I can only hope Moore has learned better.
It says something that despite the use of sexual assault, utterly objectionable on many, many levels, that I find the book is a favorite of mine.
The depth and detail of descriptions are not a problem for me, quite the contrary. The characters are realer than real The world building and concepts fascinating I was never bored
Jerusalem is such a vast book, really like a series of books overlapping in one volume. You won’t be zipping through it
I listened to the audiobook before I read the print version, which may have eased me into it. Listening to a book takes longer than reading it. Pace might make a difference, must really. Simon Vance is the narrator and he’s very good.
I’ll snatch up these books as soon as they are available. And if Vance is the reader, I will be getting the audio versions.
@gingerbug: I suspected (expected?) there were wonderful parts in it; just couldn’t get through the slog. Only read one critical review where I believed the reviewer had actually read the whole thing, and he said it nearly broke him.
Not surprised there are rapey bits in there either. That seems to be a thing that will always be a part of Moore’s writing.
Worldbuilding of a secondary world may actually play to his strengths.