Alan Moore signs deal for five-volume fantasy series and short story collection

Retired comics writer Alan Moore has signed a deal with Bloomsbury for six volumes, including a short story collection and a five-volume fantasy series.

Illuminations, the collection, will come first in autumn 2022 and will be followed in 2024 by the first book in the Long London series, an alternate-reality fantasy saga that begins in 1949 London and moves to "a version of London just beyond our knowledge."

Moore, best-known for his 1986 comic masterpiece Watchmen and other work including From Hell, V for Vendetta and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, retired from working on comics and graphic novels in 2019. In 2016 he published the utterly gigantic novel Jerusalem, a dizzyingly complex and stupendously long novel about his home town of Northampton in different time periods and different versions of reality.

Alan Moore's audiobook reader goes on 6,000 mile mission to meet him

Simon Vance is an experienced audiobook reader, known for his dulcet tones which are just right for reading lengthy novels (he's the guy who read a lot of Guy Gavriel Kay's stuff.. His latest gig is an epic one: he is recording the audiobook for Alan Moore's monster novel Jerusalem, which reportedly clocks in at over 600,000 words and 1,200 pages in hardcover (of presumably fairly small print), with an estimated audiobook run time well north of sixty-five hours.

Judging that this was a bit of a special occasion, Vance decided to meet the author and get some insight into the reportedly "difficult" novel, which shifts prose styles every chapter and includes several lengthy sections of verse (one of which extends over twelve pages, which even Tolkien might have balked at) and an entire play. The problem? Vance lives in San Francisco, California, and Moore lives in Northampton, right in the middle of England. And he only had a few days clear in his schedule. Cue a round-trip of 6,000 miles to visit the UK for just two days, only a few hours of which he got to spend with Moore (and he only got that because they have a mutual friend in Neil Gaiman).

Early reviews for Jerusalem indicate that it is a good book but also a massively challenging one, as Publisher's Weekly says:

"In this staggeringly imaginative second novel, Moore (Watchmen) bundles all his ruminations about space, time, life, and death into an immense interconnected narrative that spans all human existence within the streets of his native Northampton, U.K. Reading this sprawling collection of words and ideas isn't an activity; it's an experience... It's all a challenge to get through, and deliberately so, but bold readers who answer the call will be rewarded with unmatched writing that soars, chills, wallows, and ultimately describes a new cosmology. Challenges and all, Jerusalem ensures Moore's place as one of the great masters of the English language."

Jerusalem will be published on 13 September. The audiobook should be out around that time or later.

Alan Moore's million-word prose novel JERUSALEM gets a release date

Alan Moore is one of the most revered names in comics books, having written the seminal, acclaimed Watchmen, V For Vendetta and From Hell and contributed to many of the most famous names in the field, including Batman (most notably The Killing Joke), Superman (most famously Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?) and Swamp Thing. He has now announced that he has completed a one million-word prose novel for release this September.

Moor has been working on Jerusalem for over a decade and has occasionally dropped hints as to what the book will be about. One element the book deals with is the "consciousness event horizon", the idea that our individual consciousnesses cannot conceive of our own deaths, so at the moment of death our consciousness "rewinds" to the moment of birth and we get to live our lives over again. Some ideas suggest we are trapped into making the same exact decisions and living the same life through each time, others suggest we have freedom to change things. What version of this idea Moore will be exploring, or if that old idea for the book even holds true, is unknown.

Based on the blurb, I suspect this will not be an easy read.

In the half a square mile of decay and demolition that was England’s Saxon capital, eternity is loitering between the firetrap housing projects. Embedded in the grubby amber of the district’s narrative among its saints, kings, prostitutes, and derelicts a different kind of human time is happening, a soiled simultaneity that does not differentiate between the petrolcolored puddles and the fractured dreams of those who navigate them. Fiends last mentioned in the second-century Book of Tobit wait in urine-scented stairwells, the delinquent specters of unlucky children undermine a century with tunnels, and in upstairs parlors laborers with golden blood reduce fate to a snooker tournament.

An opulent mythology for those without a pot to piss in, through the labyrinthine streets and pages of Jerusalem tread ghosts that sing of wealth and poverty; of Africa, and hymns, and our threadbare millennium. They discuss English as a visionary language from John Bunyan to James Joyce, hold forth on the illusion of mortality post-Einstein, and insist upon the meanest slum as Blake’s eternal holy city.

Fierce in its imagining and stupefying in its scope, Alan Moore’s epic novel, Jerusalem, is the tale of Everything, told from a vanished gutter.

Jerusalem will be released on 13 September 2016.