From Kensington to the East End, under candlelight, gas lamp and then neon signs, London is both a bustling physical metropolis and a stirring psychic encounter. The most depraved depictions of London in fiction, film, poetry, television and theatre have irrevocably merged with the reality of its dark history, creating a phantasmagoria defined by murder, vice and the unnatural. In this panoptic look at the capital at its most eerie and macabre, Clive Bloom takes a tour of Gothic London's uncanny literature, arcane events and its infamous and imagined geographies. From David Bowie to T S Eliot, Thomas de Quincey to Aleister Crowley, the prophetess Joanna Southcott to the 'ghosts' of Abba and the worlds of Neil Gaiman and Clive Barker, these are the figures that populate a city lost in fog and blind alleys, where the dead can be raised, the living sacrificed and the clandestine thrive. Suturing together fact and fantasy, London Uncanny presents the urban landscape of the capital as a space of wonder and madness, haunted by its past and haunting the present. Stalking through disease and degeneracy, death and murder, spiritualism, lunacy and the occult, Bloom crafts a singular, integrated concept of a London where dreams and nightmares meet. “From Poe to ABBA's spectral presence, from Spring-heeled Jack to Crowley to the Highgate Vampire, [there is] much to fascinate in this guide to London's weird and dreamy underside.” ― Fortean Times “Clive Bloom is the perfect guide to London's uncanny, gothic side … [He] takes us wherever his mind takes him , which makes for some twisty-turny paths indeed … At times, Bloom's ability to draw connections between different phenomena, between different parts of the city, is itself uncanny.” ― Prospect “Engaging, strange and suitably mind-altering.” ― SFX Magazine “ London Uncanny is a fascinating journey through the stranger byways of the capital, as depicted through literature, and embodied in many of its most fascinating inhabitants, from David Bowie and Alesteir Crowley to TS Eliot and even the 'ghosts' of ABBA. It's an engrossing, sometimes dizzying, ride, full of hidden surprises and insights.” ― Choice, March 2025 books round-up “Eclectic and pleasantly disorientating.” ― BBC History Magazine “Richer in its findings than double cream at Twinings' 300-year-old teahouse on Strand, incantatory in its prose as sounds of choir at St. Paul's, this journey from pre-eminent Gothic scholar Clive Bloom roams and records his home city of London. He explores with ample evidence why London is an outsider island within the kingdom it administers. Bloom's command for its past and its personalities, and respect for its mystifying nature, is astonishing. On every corner, on every foggy street, something revelatory happened that we did not know, and which changes what we did know regarding the base of Britannia. Prophets and apostates, prostitutes and poets, politicians and psychologists, psychics and pretenders of all stripes - sometimes on the same street - acted or were acted upon, feeding the collective artistic, criminal, paranormal, and intellectual history of London. Not just a guide book, not purely a history of place, this volume is something more: a communion between the London flaneur and this City's surreal and haunting nature. London Uncanny does for the strange past of this Capital's streets what Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere did for its fictional life below them-reveals the secret life. ” ― Danel Olson, Chairperson of the Committee for the Bram Stoker Award and author of The Gothic War on Terror author of The Gothic War on Terror “Spied through a glass darkly, Clive Bloom's compelling and unique vision of London is revealed to be an uncanny space and cityscape of the weird. In this alternative guide, he will lead you to where the fog is thickest, a portal to an upside-down world of fantastic imaginings, eccentrics past and present, spooks and spiritualists and to the heart of an inner darkness. After reading this scintillating book , London will never be the same again!” ― Professor Marie Mulvey-Roberts, author of Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal, winner of the Allan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize “Clive Bloom has long been one of the U.K.'s principal authorities on the Gothic, and this study of the uncanny and the eldritch in London's past combines an ironclad historicity with a storyteller's grip. The book functions on a variety of levels in consummate fashion, and the writing style is immensely readable. Readers are unlikely to view the Capital and its eerie past in the same way ever again...” ― Barry Forshaw, The Financial Times Literature Critic British Crime Film/Crime Fiction: A Reader's Guide/Sex and Film/Italian Cinema/Film Noir/British Gothic Cinema/Crime Time/DVD Choice “Clive Bloom's London Uncanny: A Gothic Guide to the Capital in Weird Fiction , is, like the city itself, a phantasmagoria of shifting visions and twil