Sam asked Alan Moore:

Recently, I discovered your documentary on Northampton, 'Don't Let Me Die in Black and White' on the dark recesses of the internet, and as with much of your work, was struck by just how much you allow a sense and understanding of place to inform a story. How do you think that understanding of a place's history can be mined, exploited, or drawn upon to create a sense of horror and fear?

Alan Moore In my opinion (which is not at all humble, and which, indeed, often stridently insists that it be universally accepted as established fact) place is probably the single most important element of any work of fiction; arguably even more important than the characters and the plot, as it is always place that both character and plot emerge from, and exist in the context of. This is true whether we’re talking about a real, existing location, or about a landscape that the author has invented. While place is obviously massively important in successful horror fiction – Lovecraft’s fictitious Arkham or real Boston; M.R. James’ Aldeburgh; Ramsey Campbell’s Brichester or Liverpool – I would say that this was just as true of every other type of fiction. Certainly, an exhaustive investigation of a place that is very tiny when considered in three dimensions and immense and haunted when considered in four or more is what the entirety of Jerusalem is predicated on. And while there are certainly considerable horrors and tragedies bound up in that place, I feel that unless we excavate the whole of a place, including its humour, its triumphs, its history and its politics then we run the risk of not understanding it in its entirety. Of course, the slant that we put on a place will vary depending on what we want an individual story to achieve, but I would advise that you find out absolutely everything that you can about a place, trusting that fascinating or reveal details will be uncovered, or previously unnoticed poetic linkages. Nearly all of what I consider my most important works are predicated on place: Lost Girls in the Bodensee area; From Hell in London; Voice of the Fire and Jerusalem in Northamptonshire and the half-a-square-mile Boroughs district respectively; all of my magical performance pieces set and performed in Fleet Street, Highbury, Red Lion Square, or at a Victorian Crown Court in Newcastle; and of course Unearthing, which was an attempt to combine a deep study of a very unusual place with a deep study of an individual who had lived his entire life in that place – a necessary combination of psychogeography and psychobiography. Yeah, place: where would we be without it?

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