Movies, books and... Raymond Chandler

Excerpt from a great 1998 interview by writer Matthew De Abaitua. 

The complete piece is available HERE.

Matthew De Abaitua: Prospective TV and film projects are always so up in the air.
Alan Moore: It’s barely even up in the air, it’s in some vapourous netherdimension from which it may coalesce into something as sturdy as a soap bubble: the From Hell film is going to go into production in April, May, June – I understand Sean Connery has been signed for it, Hughes brothers to direct, it sounds like it might happen. But I’ve seen two of my books, V for Vendetta and Watchmen go through various stages of Hollywood optimism. But I’ve not been that interested. I mean, it was nice to meet Terry Gilliam, the first thing he said to me over lunch was “Well, how would you turn Watchmen into a film?” and I said, “Well to be honest Terry, I wouldn’t.” So we went on to talk about other things and just had a great lunch. But Big Numbers could work, it was always more like a TV series than a comic book anyway. All the visual elements, the backgrounds were photo-referenced, it might have been a lot easier if we had just filmed it to begin with. But Hollywood, television and film is not my prime area of interest. Because I would never have any control, working in those areas. It’s nice to get the money from a Hollywood project, but whatever they do with it, it would be their piece of work, and not mine. Someone said to Raymond Chandler, ‘how do you feel about Hollywood ruining all your books’ and he took them into his study, pointed to the shelves containing ‘Farewell My Lovely’ and all the rest of them and said, ‘there they are, they’re alright, they’re not ruined.’

Read the complete interview, HERE.

Illuminations contents

Above and below, pictures from a proof copy shared on Instagram by Kenny Chan, here.

The contents list reveals the title of the 9 short stories included in:

• Hypotethical Lizard
• Not Even Legend
• Location, Location, Location
• Cold Reading
• The Improbably Complex High-Energy State
• Illuminations
• What We Can Know About Thunderman
• American Light: An Appreciation
• And, at the Last, Just to Be Done with Silence 

The book, published by Bloomsbury, will be available in hardback, eBook and audiobook on 11 October 2022. 

You can get some hints about the stories HERE and HERE.

Illuminations are coming

Yesterday acclaimed writer Jeff VanderMeer shared on his Twitter a picture of an advance copy for the upcoming Illuminations book. 

He wrote: "Short story collection from Alan Moore... so it's 500 pages. 🤣🤣"

The book is scheduled to be released this October.

Sparks of Illuminations

New details about Illuminations, Moore's short story collection (around 500 pages!) which now has been rescheduled for October 2022 release (previously it was September):

In his first-ever short story collection, which spans forty years of work and features many never-before-published pieces, Alan Moore presents a series of wildly different and equally unforgettable characters who discover--and in some cases even make and unmake--the various unchartered parts of existence.

In A Hypothetical Lizard, two concubines in a brothel for sorcerers fall in love with tragic ramifications. In Not Even Legend, a paranormal study group is infiltrated by one of the otherworldly beings they seek to investigate. In Illuminations, a nostalgic older man decides to visit a seaside resort from his youth and finds the past all too close at hand. And in the monumental novella What We Can Know About Thunderman, which charts the surreal and Kafkaesque history of the comics industry over the last seventy-five years through several sometimes-naive and sometimes-maniacal people rising and falling on its career ladders, Moore reveals the dark, beating heart of the superhero business. [source]

Also Waterstones is offering a signed edition: HERE.

Expanding the empire of the word

Detail from a portrait by Farel Dalrymple

More details have been revealed about the upcoming new prose books by Moore.

 

Excerpts from an article published the 3rd of May on The Guardian site, here. 

Alan Moore [...] has signed a six-figure deal for a “groundbreaking” five-volume fantasy series as well as a “momentous” collection of short stories.

Bloomsbury, home to the Harry Potter novels, acquired what it described as two “major” projects from the 67-year-old. The first, Illuminations, is a short story collection which will be published in autumn 2022 and which moves from the four horsemen of the apocalypse to the “Boltzmann brains” fashioning the universe. Bloomsbury said it was “dazzlingly original and brimming with energy”, promising a series of “beguiling and elegantly crafted tales that reveal the full power of imagination and magic”.

The second acquisition is a fantasy quintet titled Long London, which will launch in 2024. The series will move from the “shell-shocked and unravelled” London of 1949 to “a version of London just beyond our knowledge”, encompassing murder, magic and madness. Bloomsbury said it “promises to be epic and unforgettable, a tour-de-force of magic and history”.

[...] Speaking about his book deal, Moore said that he was at a moment in his career when he was “bursting with fiction, bursting with prose”.

“I 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,” said Moore. “I have a feeling this will be a very productive partnership.”

The complete article is available here.

Illuminations, Long London 1: books are coming...

Details are emerging regarding Moore's upcoming books: Illuminations and Long London (book 1), both to be published by Bloomsbury

The first-ever short story collection from the beloved creator of Watchmen and numerous other classics, a beguiling series of tales on the revealing power of magic and imagination.

 

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.

Bloomsbury Publishing - Publication date: 6 September 2022

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From the beloved creator of Watchmen and numerous other classics, the Long London series is a tour-de-force that tells the story of the timeless shadow city full of magic and memory somewhere beyond the "real London."

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.

Bloomsbury Publishing - Publication date: 2 April 2024

Not Even Legend short story

An Alan Moore new short story titled Not Even Legend is included in Uncertainties volume V published by Swan River Press in March. More info HERE.

Uncertainties is an anthology series — featuring authors from Canada, America, the United Kingdom, and the island of Ireland — each exploring the concept of increasingly fragmented senses of reality. These types of short stories were termed “strange tales” by Robert Aickman, called “tales of the unexpected” by Roald Dahl, and known to Shakespeare’s ill-fated Prince Mamillius as “winter’s tales”. But these are no mere ghost stories. These tales of the uncanny grapple with existential epiphanies of the modern day, when otherwise familiar landscapes become sinister and something decidedly less than certain . . . 

Visit the publisher's site to order a copy: HERE.

Voice of the Fire: 25th Anniversary Edition

Art by John Coulthart.

Alan Moore's first prose novel, Voice of the Fire, is getting a 25th anniversary edition. It will be out in May, co-published by Top Shelf Productions in the United States and Knockabout in Britain, with a stunning new cover by John Coulthart (see above and below).

John Coulthart: [...] I liked the original cover but felt it made the novel seem too much like something by Henry Treece or Alan Garner, with no indication of more recent history. A stained-glass window seemed like a good solution to the problem of how to bring together so many disparate elements into a single design. Stained-glass windows are often things from the distant past still visible in the present day, and they have the additional convenience of being a single container for many small pictorial details.
My design doesn’t attempt to illustrate all the characters or events from the novel but shows the more salient moments together with smaller details, some of which (the noose, for example) appear in multiple chapters. [Read more here.]

More info HERE too.

Art by John Couthart.