Unearthing

by Alan Moore

THE SPECIAL OVER-SIZED HARDCOVER EDITION

"Steve Moore, who lives in the same room he was born in 61 years earlier, is a living metaphor for the history, geography and geology of Shooter's Hill and a conduit to the Greek gods and spiritual manifestations... Is it great art? Yes!" -- N.M.E.
“The men of Unearthing are only marginally of this plane of existence, and what they’ve created is positively out of this world.” -- The AV Club
“A tribute to a colleague and mentor and a demonstration that Moore has transcended the boundaries of the graphic novel.” – The New York Times
One of the world’s foremost authors of the fantastic, Alan Moore, joins internationally esteemed photographer Mitch Jenkins for an unprecedented visual and literary experience. An intensely poetic and innovative work of biography, Unearthing maps the lifetime of author, orientalist and occultist Steve Moore, while simultaneously investigating the extraordinary history of South London with which that life has been intertwined. Integrating text with haunting and exquisite imagery, Unearthing excavates a territory at the margins of a city, of reality, and of human imagination.
Starting life in Iain Sinclair’s seminal anthology LONDON: City of Disappearances, this dazzling and hypnotic piece has evolved through a series of live performances and acclaimed recordings, culminating in this breathtaking full-color volume. Three formats are available, a deluxe softcover edition, a special oversized hardcover edition limited to 1,200 copies worldwide, and a special signed and numbered oversized hardcover edition limited to 300 copies worldwide.
-- Co-Published by Top Shelf Productions and Knockabout.
-- 184 Pages, 11.75” x 16.5” aka A3 size (wow!)

Genres: Comics, Art, Poetry, Nonfiction, Biography, Photography, History

184 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2012

About the author

Alan Moore is an English writer most famous for his influential work in comics, including the acclaimed graphic novels Watchmen, V for Vendetta and From Hell. He has also written a novel, Voice of the Fire, and performs "workings" (one-off performance art/spoken word pieces) with The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels, some of which have been released on CD.

As a comics writer, Moore is notable for being one of the first writers to apply literary and formalist sensibilities to the mainstream of the medium. As well as including challenging subject matter and adult themes, he brings a wide range of influences to his work, from the literary–authors such as William S. Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Anton Wilson and Iain Sinclair; New Wave science fiction writers such as Michael Moorcock; horror writers such as Clive Barker; to the cinematic–filmmakers such as Nicolas Roeg. Influences within comics include Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Kirby and Bryan Talbot.

Reviews

[Alexander · Rating 3 out of 5]

A swirling tidepool of empurpled syntax, best experienced after a bong hit from a goat skull, Moore's performance-art logorrhea comes on like Nighttown Ulysses sieved through Charles Fort and Aleister Crowley.

You either cannonball yourself into the flood, or, like I did, pull in and out of this molasses-thick glug-torrent, alternately transported and annoyed. Too much of Unearthing could have been scribbled out by a precociously word-drunk teenager:

"He's snoring in the fourth dimension as a gorgeous fractal millipede, his limbs a frilly Muybridge ruff, asleep on Duchamp's staircase. He's a Julia Set, an emerald gorgon fern unwinding from the luminous coelenterate complexity that is his mother, drifting there beside him in a grand fluid continuum, the albumen contained by spacetime's egg. Jewel-coral, with his tail in the zygotic damp, his head cremated dust scattered across the Brinklow Crescent burial mound, he's a subsidiary offshoot coiling from the parent form, evolving its own crenellated intricacies but forever tied to the maternal Mandelbrot. Moored fast."

As a magickal visualization exercise for neo-Goth psychonauts, Unearthing is a workout. Those who enjoyed the ley-line Masonic geomancy chapter of From Hell or the crash course in pyro-gyno that was Promethea will find themselves on exultant ground here. Nevertheless, this side to Moore's persona has become so familiar that one rarely feels he's storming out on his phantom steed into strange new dimensions, but rather riding his crotch raw on old, creaky hobbyhorses. Which sucks, because normally I'd be inclined to praise to the skies anything that namedrops my favorite fantasy book: "Montague Druitt, cricketer and fit-up Ripper suspect with his astral doppelganger David Lindsay, author of A Voyage to Arcturus, translucent fantasy that opens at a London seance then progresses into fiery allegorical terrain that characters must sprout new sensory organs even to perceive."

Verdict: some flavorsome chunks in an overrich stew, but much too pricey. Borrow or bootleg instead.

[Sydney Freeman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unearthing starts off with a passage about disappearing, or disconnecting from everything around you. This intro perfectly describes the titular essay Unearthing, in which Alan Moore has a startlingly detailed account of Steve Moore’s (no relation) life. I’ve never encountered a book quite like Unearthing. To the average comic book reader, Steve Moore’s name is one of hundreds of other comic book creators, nowhere near the universal acclaim of Alan Moore himself. Unearthing is Alan Moore’s attempt to shed some light on the life of his former mentor.

Unearthing is a very weird read. It’s an essay that’s half disguised as a biography and half disguised as a geographical experiment. Steve Moore is a man that’s lived all of his life in one location -- Shooter’s Hill; a district in east London. Unearthing was my first exposure to the study of psychogeography, which involves a situational look at geography to deride the effects of the environment has on certain individuals. So at first glance, Unearthing will appear to be just about Steve Moore, but somewhere down the line you’ll find yourself on Shooter’s Hill, thousands of years before Steve Moore is born. You’ll get quick glimpses of Shooter’s Hill in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, the political landscape of the Feudal Era, and a particularly engaging look at Shooter’s Hill’s importance during World War II. The essay then segues into Steve Moore’s childhood and life, touching on his early attempts to break into the comic industry and his first attempts at magic.

If the content seems peculiar, the format is definitely more unusual. Unearthing is presented by Mitch Jenkins as a series of photographs, intersected by text in a variety of ways. Sometimes the text is upside down, at times it’s in a spiral, other times the page is blank save for one word. The fonts change shape, color, as well as size, and sometimes it all happens on the same page. The effect is dazzling and dizzying. The photographs themselves are usually related in some clever way, each page setting the tone for the accompanying text.

If all this seems particularly dense, it is. Alan Moore’s prose is richly detailed and packed to the brim with information. The man is a wizard with words. His descriptions of Shooter’s Hill in particular are some of the best I’ve ever seen from any other writer.

Unearthing is a strange book, and I mean that in the best possible way. Alan Moore and Mitch Jenkins push the comic book medium and the written word to their natural extremes in this avant-garde take on Steve Moore’s life. The best way to experience Unearthing is to read the book with the official audiobook (narrated by Alan Moore himself) playing in the background.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 Stars--Four Stars Writing, 5 Stars Audio Book/Music, 3 Stars Photo Essay. I read this while listening to Alan Moore's recording and trying to draw in Mitch Jenkin's photography.

This book is a seminal touchtone of Alan Moore's work. While seemingly only a touching tribute to his mentor, Steve Moore--in many ways this book touches on the psychogeography of Ian Sinclair and which would ultimately influence Voice of the Fire and Jerusalem, as well as giving insights to the forthcoming "Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic", as well as his work with Mitch Jenkin's via Jimmy's End and "The Show". This also gives insight into Steve Moore's Somnium, Strange Attractor and Fortean Time efforts.

It's incredibly atmospheric and spiritual. Reminiscent of Ulysses in the best way.

I'm patiently waiting on "The Earthing" about Steve Moore's Passing.

[Alexis · Rating 4 out of 5]

An often breathtaking symphony of verbiage, figuration, and poetic sublation. But I emerge from this frequently exhausting experience with the feeling that I’ve learned a great deal more about Alan Moore than I have about his friend Steve Moore (no relation), the book’s putative subject.

[Alex Sarll]

I've read Alan Moore's excellent and haunting novella-length biography of his friend, collaborator and non-relation Steve Moore twice in its original form, contained in the Iain Sinclair-edited London: City of Disappearances. I've also been lucky enough to tour some its Shooter's Hill locations with its subject. And now I've read the solo version, expanded to a book of its own by Mitch Jenkins photography. This is not, let's be clear, a comic - but I feel something of the same 'why?' that I do when faced with a comics adaptation of prose. If the words stood alone and conjured their own imagery, how much is gained by adding images, even when (as here) they are in themselves fine and evocative images? There's a certain voyeuristic charge when you realise that yes, that really is Steve Moore's house, his room, his icon of his love, the goddess Selene - but even this is undermined, for me, by having Steve Moore himself played in these images by someone else, someone who necessarily doesn't quite fit the accompanying descriptions. There are also times when the typography passes from innovative and evocative to baroque and unreadable. The essential power of the work still shines through, but I can't entirely see why this version needs to exist.

[Alexandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whimsical and dark adventure of a graphic novel/visual essay. Abundent in noir conceptual photography, with a brutal and schizophrenic typographical style and beatnik poetry-like sounding scattered text. I knew OF Moore, of the fanatic comic book writer who created Watchmen and V for Vendetta and the philosophical Promethea series, but I never really truly dove into his universe quite like in this one, into his hermeticism and his spiralling nightmarish exploration of the subconscious and London's symbolism and history paired with an homage to his mentor and fellow cartoonist Steve Moore.

It's a weird, hard to swallow, but worth-it treat for the eyes and the mind. Plus I hear there is a 2h reading by Moore himself that brings a whole new level to the experience. 4 stars because I'm a complete philistine when it comes to graphic novels and it was a bit of a struggle reading this text in all its literal shapes and sizes while navigating the whirlwind that was the essay itself. Maybe for more adept eyes it would have been more fluid of an experience.

[Jamie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some books suffer from being over-hyped. This is one of them. It's a very well-told and nice tribute to Alan Moore's friend and mentor Steve Moore (no relation), and the prose is exactly as flowing and flowery (albeit, dead flowers) as I'd expected, but I found some of the delivery to be lacking in the design. From passages filled with painfully tiny font-size, to the awful choice of calligraphic fonts in other places that were literally indecipherable, a lot of the fun and flow was sucked right out of the read. It's too bad because I was really looking forward to this one and had heard such great things that it's frankly deflating to be left with an experience that fell a little flat and disappointing.

[Eelco Slierendrecht · Rating 4 out of 5]

If William Burroughs were British and able to write about anyone other than himself, Unearthing feels like the novel he would then be able to write. Is it a true biography? I don't know. It might be, or it might be more akin to Jeff Vandermeer his Shriek: An Afterword; a fictional history. Moore uses the biographical element of this story as a temporal grid in which he places his observations and descriptions, commenting as much on society as on the main character, blurring the lines between fiction and non-fiction, biography and weird to create something unique.

[Gonzalo Oyanedel · Rating 3 out of 5]

El original recorrido biográfico que Alan Moore traza sobre el también escritor Steve Moore (aprovechando su faceta orientalista y ocultista) y entrelaza con la historia del sur de Londres da pie a un creativo registro fotográfico de Mitch Jenkins para conformar un conjunto personalísimo, pero alucinante.

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

Didn't think much of it. Masturbatory.

[Hagai Palevsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Now everything is wonderful and hazardous, and nothing’s hypothetical.”

[Ben Tye · Rating 4 out of 5]

First appeared as an essay then a series of performance events and now a hardback, in super size that you have to manhandle and spin to read the often hard to read text. I've read Somnium, Stephen Moore's novel published by Strange Attractor Press that represents the culmination of this biography and his obsession with Celene and identification as Endymion. Without this, I suspect the book might seem overblown or simply confusing. The book is really big; as big as Jung's Red Book or similar sized artist tomes but the text over the photographs work really well.

[Stewart Tame · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow! This really defies description. In part, it's a biography of Steve Moore, British comics writer, magick enthusiast and orientalist (and no relation to Alan; they just happen to have the same last name.). Of course, as with most Alan Moore books, nothing is that simple. This is a fantastic melding of photos and text, mixing Steve's life with the history of London and Alan's own occult interests. This is definitely a book worth rereading to pick up on the nuances.

[Benjamin Barham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really, this rating is for the original release of Unearthing, which is a record set of Moore reading the script over unnerving music. Having experienced it in that form so many times, with his slow, English drawl, just reading the story doesn't really cut it.

Although the photography is stellar.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

via NYPL - fever-dream, purple prose biography of Moore's friend and mentor Steve Moore, dappled with magical ruminations and local history.

[Luis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent audio-book, some what forgotten.