Alan Moore’s Next Books Illuminations, Long London: Bloomsbury UK

Alan Moore, modern-day Saruman and creator of comic masterpieces like Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and From Hell, has just signed with a new book publisher, and his upcoming fiction series sounds… well, like just the sort of things Alan Moore tends to write.

The author has signed with Bloomsbury UK, but the real news is his upcoming fiction. The first is a book of short stories titled Illuminations, and the other, more epic work is a massive five-volume series titled Long London. The official descriptions: “Illuminations is an astonishing, rich, and broad collection of short stories, each featuring some kind of illumination or realization. From ghosts and otherworldly creatures to the four horsemen of the apocalypse to the Boltzmann brains fashioning the universe at the big bang, Alan Moore’s Illuminations is a series of beguiling and elegantly crafted tales that reveal the full power of imagination and magic.”

Then Long London is “a series about ‘a sometimes-accessible shadow city that is beyond time.’ This is a hugely inventive, atmospheric, mythical world of murder, magic and madness. It is a quintet of novels that sweeps across the 20th century, starting in the shell-shocked and unravelled London of 1949, and following the populations of writers, criminals, artists, and magicians through that familiar city and a version of London just beyond our knowledge.”

If you’ve read Moore’s 2016 stand-alone novel Jerusalem, which by itself was so labyrinthine to arguably be also “sometimes-accessible,” the idea of Moore having five volumes to tell a single story is intimidating, if not outright threatening. But Jerusalem was also quite good, and Alan Moore remains Alan Moore, so both Illuminations and Long London especially stand to be just more marvels in Moore’s canon. Right now, Bloomsbury plans to release Illuminations in the fall of 2022 and the first volume of Long London sometime in 2024. Of course, it took Moore a full decade to write Jerusalem, so I wouldn’t necessarily save the date just yet.

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