The sequel to The Great When, a dark and haunting journey through the streets of London – real or imagined – from a legend of modern fantasy.It seems the Italian book will be available before the original English language version scheduled for... May 2026!
Alan Moore: [about his fascination with post-war London] I think that the main reason why I wanted to write The Great When was because I'd noticed in my readings that all of my favourite London characters were essentially low-life characters who had slipped through the cracks of conventional history. People like Iron Foot Jack or Prince Monolulu or particularly Austin Osman Spare.
I thought that these people suggested a different history of London and it was that that I wanted to pick out in The Great When.
Samira Ahmed: You know reading the prose of this book from the very first paragraph it feels like you're revelling in painting vivid pictures in words. Is it liberating not writing for comics or did comics liberate you to write this freely?
AM: I think that comics probably certainly affected my writing. Certainly in my later books, in books like Jerusalem, I was very aware that I am known mostly as a comics writer - which is something which I am probably not that happy about and which I'm trying to rectify - but I was aware that I might be seen as a comics writer who suddenly hadn't got an artist.
So I think that I wanted to compensate to make the pictures inside the reader's head and I've come to realise recently that probably the major influence upon all of my prose work would probably be Mervyn Peake.
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| Mervyn Peake |
Alan Moore: [...] The Great When is the first of five books in the Long London series which is an excavation of some of the more marginal and little known points of London's history that is all stirred up into a very very baroque fantasy. And there's been a lot of books that have actually very much played into the writing of The Great When.I mean one of them is Pariah/Genius by my very good friend Ian Sinclair; for my money one of the best writers in the English language. And in Pariah/Genius he's following the story of John Deakin, who was the photographer that Francis Bacon actually got all of those images from. And not a very likable man, but a very, very interesting man. And Ian has done this wonderful story about John Deakin. He's already dead when the book opens and the rest of the book is the thought going through the mind of this extraordinary dying man.Other books that have played into The Great When would include Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman, probably one of my favourite novels ever. The main thing about Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman is it's very, very strange and quite frightening in places but it's very, very funny. And that was something that I was trying to keep in mind while writing my book that there's no reason why everything has to be straight-faced. There's no problem with having a laugh once in a while.And the third book that certainly was a huge inspiration was Brian Catling's The Vorrh. This is the first book of a trilogy. But having read this, I realised that Brian had really raised the bar for fantasy writing because fantasy, as I see it, really shouldn't be about things that you already know about. I mean, I've got a lot of room for magicians and dragons and all the rest of the fantasy paraphernalia, but I would prefer a fantasy that gives you things that you've never even imagined before. And certainly in the Vorrh trilogy, Brian does that in spades.So while I was writing my books, I was thinking of all of these authors and trying to make sure that my book was at least in the same ballpark as these greats.
Zach Rabiroff: All your novels to date have been concerned to a great extent with a sense of place—with Voice of the Fire and Jerusalem, it was Northampton, which allowed you to draw on personal experience. And now in The Great When you’re dealing with London.Alan Moore: I like to think that wherever I’m writing about, and in whatever form, I have always tried to pay attention to place, whether in my comic work or other work. I was quite pleased to get a lot of letters from American readers asking how long I’d lived in Louisiana [after using it as a setting in Swamp Thing]. That was touching. But no, actually it was just all research, and then imagining myself into the place. And of course with things like From Hell, it was immersing myself in London.
[...] The majority of comics—when I started working in them—were set in America. So it felt quite radical to set some stories in London. When I did Voice of the Fire, that seemed to me to be quite audacious in that it was setting a whole novel in Northampton, which is largely a place that nobody cares about, and that doesn’t even get a mention on the local weather maps. And the same with Jerusalem, where I did it much more intensely. But that doesn’t mean that I exhausted London. The nature of a place like that means that you probably never could exhaust it. It’s infinitely deep with stories. [...]
I was actually going to ask whether you consider writing— artistic creation—itself an act of magic.
It is. I believe that all art and creation is an act of magic, consciously or unconsciously. But I believe that writing, specifically, is the closest to actual magic. If you look at the magic gods of most cultures, they are also gods of language. Hermes is the god of magic, but he's also the god of communication. The Egyptian magic god is also the scribe god, which tends to suggest that there is something, a rather intimate connection, between writing and magic.
[...] with writing, just writing straight prose, which is all I'm doing now, I think that that has got to be the most elegant form of art. You can do so much with so little. All you've got are 26 characters peppered with punctuation.
You’re summoning reality into being with an incantation, so to speak.
You can create the whole universe from those 26 letters, any conceivable universe. And that is the immense power of writing. In writing Long London, I'm actually building that space. This is something that I learned that you can do. I probably learned it from Mervyn Peake, when I first read the Gormenghast books, and I thought, this is incredible—actually creating an architectural space in my mind. Even at this late age, I remember Gormenghast a lot better than I remember places that I've actually been. Better than places in the real world.
Magic has got to be the art of causing changes in people's consciousness, including that of the practitioner. And anything that you can do with magic, you can do with writing. [...] You can be anything as a writer. [...]
We can never know another human being; that is the sorry fact of our existence. We can never know anything outside of our own skulls. And so, to a degree, everybody around us, the people that we love the most, are fictions that we have made up. We are fictions that we have made up. I can almost remember making me up when I was about 13 or 14. I can almost remember thinking that this childhood personality I have is going to be no use at all; if I want to have a girlfriend, I better write a new one. [...]
I wish I was made of writing, because then I wouldn't be in such a stage of physical collapse, and I would still be as gorgeous looking as I was 40 years ago instead of just almost as gorgeous looking as I was 40 years ago. If I was made of writing, I would be in perfect condition forever. And also, our fictional characters are going to meet and interact with a lot more people than we are, and for a lot longer time. Our fictions have a great deal of importance, I believe, not just as entertainment, but because they provide part of the infrastructure and armature of our world.
Alan Moore: [...] Machen’s narratives, especially those courting ecstasy and terror, do not offer anything as simpleminded as escapism, but rather would seem to promote a more perceptive and involved engagement with the mysteries of our mortal condition. Given that, politically, Machen’s position and my own would almost certainly be very different, it is not political but overarching human relevance that I find in his fantasies and, for that matter, in all of the fantasies from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress through to Brian Catling’s Vorrh that I consider to be relevant to their historic moments; that I feel successfully perform fantasy’s one real job, which is to cast light on reality from a projected point outside it. For the genre to achieve this apex would seem to require a burning passion in the fantasist concerned, to demand the conviction and commitment that we find in William Blake, or Rabelais, or in the major works of Arthur Machen.
[...] it must be a fantasy that had some kind of relevance to the contemporary world where, with luck, it is being read. I had decided by then that the story taking shape would need five volumes to tell properly, and that these would be set successively at the ends of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and, after a narrative gap of some twenty years, the 1990s. The sequences, both those set in historic London and its underlying, glorious symbolic counterpart, enable me, I realised, to obliquely speak about our present century by offering an alternate history of the last one; a poetic, metaphorical account of how we got here, making Machen’s secret capital into a place outside of history that lends us a fresh angle from which to observe that history, a view from Canons Park. This, at least, is the hare-brained theory that I’m hoping will sustain both me and this unprecedented venture over these next few slapstick dystopian years. I’m just starting book three as I write this and, at least so far, my bizarre hypothesis seems to be holding up. [...]
Alan Moore contributes essay to Faunus
June 22, 2025
We are thrilled to announce that fellow Friend Alan Moore has written an article for the latest edition of Faunus (No.51). In The View From Canons Park, Alan candidly reveals the origins of his Long London series, and why an often overlooked Arthur Machen story sits at the heart of it's first book, The Great When - (reviewed by R.B Russell, also in this edition). [...]
Faunus No.51 is already making its way to members worldwide and is limited to just 350 numbered editions. New or renewed members will receive a physical copy while stocks last, however all members will be able to download the digital version, available now in the Friends' Area.
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Faunus No.51 - Second Edition (Unlimited)
July 02, 2025
Last month, we announced that Alan Moore had contributed an article for the latest edition of Faunus. This news triggered a surge in memberships and renewals, although regrettably our limited run of 350 copies was not enough to meet the demand. Not wishing to disappoint any of our new joiners, we have ordered a re-print. These Second Editions will be unlimted and issued to everyone who missed out on the hand-numbered version. This is the first time in our journal's 27-year history where we've required a second run and we hope that this way, we don't leave anyone empty-handed whilst staying true to our founding aim; promoting the work of Arthur Machen!
The imagery in The Great When is so arresting and vivid. Did working with great artists over the years, like Kevin O’Neill in League, influence your descriptive writing?
Alan Moore: Yes, I've certainly learned from some of the creators that I've worked with, but you have to remember that I had described those pictures for the artist. I've got the visual imagination, but I just didn't have the artistic chops to realize it as beautifully as I saw it in my head when I made the shift from cartooning to writing comics. My descriptive passages that were intended only for the artist are famously long-winded, and sometimes go on for pages for a single panel. Generally speaking, one page of comics would be about three pages of my script, because I was trying to describe everything that I could imagine in a particular scene.
So working in straight prose fiction, it's always been using the same sensibility and using the same descriptive of abilities, but just shifting the register up so that you are not just writing practical descriptions for an artist. You are actually writing literary descriptions that are meant to entertain and hypnotize the reader.
But it's basically the same process I have. I became very conscious around the time when I was writing Jerusalem, that yes, alright, I'm well-known for being a comics writer, and people have come to expect illustrated narratives from me. So in my prose, I want to really make up for that. If anything, I was being more keen upon generous descriptions to try and compensate for not having an artist like Kevin O'Neill or Melinda Gebbie or any of the other great artists that I've worked with.
And since I happen to be lucky enough to be married to Melinda, she has been very, very useful coming up with colors. If I want to talk about blue, and I've already used ‘blue violet’ and ‘indigo’ and ‘sapphire,’ she'll say, what about ‘lapis’? Oh, that's a lovely word. So that has been very handy.
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| Ave, Glicone! |
Alan Moore: [...] Well, The Bumper Book is about magic, whereas The Great When has got some magicians in it, but it isn’t really anything that is traditional magic — I was prepared to just make most of it up. The Bumper Book is an encyclopaedic history of magic and all sorts of other things as well, but we’ve got characters like Austin Osman Spare, Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune in both.
So, there’s a tiny bit of overlap, but the intents of both books are different. One is to explain magic as it is and as it has been, and the other is an attempt to try and create something new in fantasy, without relying upon all the magical tropes you get reiterated so often in fantasy novels. [...]
I mean, the book is me and Steve but if there’s a third contributor it would have to be John, not only for his own beautiful art but his design of the entire book, and making all the other artists fit into it so beautifully. It was him who decided to have the cut-out and assemble temple at the back and the puzzle pages with the goat of Mendes as a join the dots picture, that was him. We thought as well as the immense amount of information in the book, we should have some fun as well. Something that reminds me of an old British annual like the Beano. [...]
[...] with the sequences in Long London I thought I want these to feel as disorienting as it would do if you were suddenly in another world. One of the things about this book is I’m really tired in current fantasy about how the kids go through the back of the wardrobe in Narnia and it’s not really a big deal. Y’know, people go into these worlds as if it was visiting Milton Keynes. [...]
Any time any of my characters enter The Great When, they’re vomiting, weeping, fainting, because that’s what I figure ordinary people would do, if something even slightly fantastic happened. If something happened that challenged your whole ideas of reality, you would fall to bits. Any of us would. We certainly wouldn’t be acting like action heroes. I wanted to get the alienness of this other world, I wanted to establish that. So I thought when we get to the Great When, we shift to italics, because italics makes everything seem more urgent, and shift to the present tense to make it more immediate. [...]
[about alien existence] Let’s act as if we’re on our own. If we do find some nice aliens at some point, that’ll be a treat, but let’s act as if we’re on our own and actively try and sustain life on this planet. Let’s not have these science fiction wank dreams that people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson seem to be having, this cosmic circle jerk. Let’s not talk about terraforming Mars, because anyone who knows about that stuff knows it’s impossible. First we’d have to work out what turned Mars’ electromagnetic field off in the first place, because it hasn’t got one, and then turn it back on, if that’s even possible. [...]
[about Dennis Knuckleyard's name] Well, it was the first time it’s ever happened to me where it came to be semi-conscious, and I suspect a name like that can only come to you when you’re semi-conscious. I was drifting off to sleep and I was in that hypnagogic wilderness between awake and asleep, where there’s just a load of nonsense going through your head. Just a word salad, a stream of connected words and thoughts that don’t really connect but become a narrative you’re telling yourself as you’re drifting off to sleep.
I was just on the verge of sleep when the internal narrator said “so then Dennis Knuckleyard went…” and I sat up in bed, laughing. I just thought that is the most ridiculous name I’ve ever heard, I’m going to write that down. I did have a pen and pad by the bed for writing down dreams but I’m undisciplined when it comes to that so I don’t generally do it. I’d never written an idea down in the middle of the night before, but I put the light on, wrote “Dennis Knuckleyard” and then went off to sleep. It’s a great name, I did a little piece for the local Arts Lab magazine, an experimental piece where I actually tried out the name, not the character, but it wasn’t very satisfying. When it came to The Long London books, I thought that’s the one, isn’t it.
When I found out that there had never, in the history of the world, been anybody or anything called Knuckleyard then, rather than be discouraged, I thought let’s make him part of the story; that both Dennis and his mother have no idea where his now deceased father got the name from in the first place. Did he make it up as a joke? Is it a misspelling of some foreign name? They’ll never know. It was something of a gift. [...]
What I’m enjoying about Dennis is that in the first book he’s 18. The book I’m writing now he’s 28, he’s not grown up a huge amount but he’s grown up some and he’s doing some of that in the course of the book. At 28, you’re only just out of your adolescence, we don’t get out of adolescence until we’re 25, 26, so you’re not quite settled into adult life — you’re having to pretend that you’re an adult, but you’re not quite settled into what feels like an adult identity yet. That’s where Dennis is at the moment, and it’s interesting. One of the things about writing these books, one’s in 1949, 59, 69, 79 — twenty year gap — 1999.So, characters like Dennis, you can show their development up through fifty years and you can also do that with the book’s main character, which is London. [...]
[about Glycon] Glycon, in various forms, is in the room with us. He’s on a bunch of Romanian postage stamps and money, that I’ve been sent over the year that have images of Glycon on.
It’s still a very big part of my life, even if he was a glove puppet. Especially because he was a glove puppet. [...]
“For the first time in my career, I’m genuinely excited and enthusiastic about a work of mine…one that I own, and believe could work marvelously in a different medium…being adapted for the screen,” Watchmen author Alan Moore says in a rare quote about his new fantasy novel, The Great When, getting a TV adaptation. In a competitive bidding situation, Colin Callender‘s production company Playground has landed the rights to the book by the famous graphic novelist [...]
“In Playground, I feel that I’ve connected with people who respect both me and the narrative and are receptive to such input as I can offer,” he said. “And, given Playground’s track record, I have little doubt that this will be anything short of spectacular. It’s taken me some time, but I think at last I’m ready for my closeup.”
Playground landed the rights to The Great When competing against a slew of other suitors. “We did take a big swing with this, really, we wrote a big check to get this,” Callender said.
Talks are already underway with writers for the adaptation. While only the first book has been published, “the roadmap is completely laid out,” with Moore working on the rest of the novels [...]
Read the whole article HERE.
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| Art by Lambuja |
A novel is more like a car crash of ideas. In this case I felt compelled to write something about London’s more spectral low-life figures, and to pick up on author Arthur Machen’s notion of a truer world concealed behind our own. I’d like the reader to know that, other than many of the characters and all of the historic detail, this book is an outrageous fantasy of things that never happened, and also that, in the riotous secret soul of London, every word of it is somehow true. - Alan MooreYou can read the complete article HERE.
Alan Moore: For me, when writing The Great When and the subsequent books in The Long London series, the most enjoyable thing has been taking actual history and then managing to fill the cracks in that history with delirious fantasy. So that I hope that the reader will sometimes find it difficult to tell the difference between the two.Starting the series in 1949 seemed like a good move because at that time London was in pieces, shattered by the events of the previous five or six years by the hail of bombs and V bombs. After which I would imagine that the average Londoner’s sense of reality had been drastically overhauled psychologically and socially. The whole of the city, the whole of the country was in pieces, it was in fragments. It was trying to work out what was going on and what its identity was. It was very unstable. We had questions of whether we should adopt nuclear weapons were starting to arise. We had a rise in what we would today call serial murderers after the Second World War.All of these things gave the landscape a very uneasy and shifting uncertain feeling. And upon that landscape in 1949 I thought that that would make a wonderful setting on which to erect the outrageous edifice of The Great When.
[...] the protagonist of The Great When was one Dennis Knuckleyard, and [...] Alan Moore came up with the name from a dream diary of his. "The only promising item that they've thrown up so far is an intriguing sounding name: Dennis Knuckleyard. I may find a place to use this in the future, or I may not." But it seems the name was also used as a pseudonym for Moore in a Northampton fanzine called Dream, with a story titled "My Protocol", listed – and then withdrawn – on eBay for £400, described as being "very rare, approx. 50 copies were made and sold mostly at local poetry reading events." Good luck hunting that!You can read the complete piece HERE. And... let me know if you find a copy of Dream!
Moore is “making more of an effort to conjure this spell of words to involve the readers, to make them feel like they are viscerally there, like these things are actually happening to them in a vicarious sense”. But he expects the same effort in return: “I’m depending upon readers to do at least part of the work, because I think that the more work they do, the more they will enjoy it.”
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| Art by Nicolas Delort |
Delort: I recently had the high honor of illustrating the cover for 'The Great When', the next book by legendary author Alan Moore.
I would like to thank Alan Moore, the team at @bloomsburypublishing and art director @gregheinimanndesign for trusting me with this daunting job, and allowing me to go a little nuts on the clouds there :D
"The Great When", the first book in the Long London series, will take you on a winding journey through the city's occult underbelly, where an eccentric cast of sorcerers, gangsters and murderers awaits....
The artwork was created on 16x12" @ampersand_art claybord with ink pens and a scratching knife
The novel is slated to release in October '24"
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| Art by Nicolas Delort |
[...] Moore completists will love it. I found it too fantastical to be effective and too effective to be fantastical. [...]
Two stars out of five
[...] What I love about it is how the Maestro Moore has created a mid-century Britain that feels alive and then peppered it with a technicolour Otherworld, as if The Wizard of Oz were taking place in 1940s London, bookended with spivs and crooks that are equal parts East End and Cthulhu. The cast is stunning, barely dipping into any of them before the book draws to close, hinting at some of the adventures to come. [...]
Five stars out of five
[...] The story is wrapped up nicely but there are plenty of hooks for the series to continue and I certainly look forward to seeing how things pan out and what the motley cast of misfits get up to next.
My only criticism is that the lengthy prologue, which is about the same length as a chapter of the book, felt quite hard to get into. Even re-reading it after finishing the novel I felt that there were sections which I didn’t understand and can only assume that these are preliminary forays into the later books of the series. If the first few pages feel totally incomprehensible don’t give up, the main story is well worth waiting for.
Just as a note of caution - this is definitely a story for adults in language, tone and content. [...]
Four stars out of five
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| UK edition |
A dark and beguiling tour through the streets of a magical London by the Sunday Times bestselling master of modern fantasy, Alan Moore
The year is 1949, the city London. Dennis Knuckleyard is a hapless eighteen-year-old who works and lives in a second-hand bookstore. One day, on an errand to retrieve rare books, Dennis discovers that one of them does not exist. It is a fictitious book, yet it is physically there in his hands nonetheless. How? It comes from the Great When, a dark and magical version of the city that is beyond time. There, epochs blend and realities and unrealities blur. If Dennis does not take this book back to the other London, he will be killed.
So begins a journey delving deep into the city's occult underbelly and tarrying with an eccentric cast of sorcerers, gangsters, and murderers, many of whom have their own nefarious intentions. Soon Dennis finds himself at the center of an explosive series of events that may alter and endanger both Londons.
Mystical, magnificently written and hilarious, The Great When is Moore's most imaginative work yet and the first in the fantastic new Long London series.
From the New York Times bestselling author and legendary storyteller Alan Moore, the first book in an enthralling new fantasy series about murder, magic, and madness in post-WWII London.
Dennis Knuckleyard is a hapless eighteen-year-old who works and lives in a second-hand bookstore. One day, his boss and landlady, Coffin Ada, sends him to retrieve some rare books, one of which, Dennis discovers, should not exist. A London Walk by Rev. Thomas Hampole is a fictitious book that appears in a real novel by another author. Yet A London Walk is physically there in his hands, nonetheless.
Coffin Ada tells Dennis the book comes from the other London, the Great When, a version of the city that is beyond time. In the Great When, epochs blend and realities and unrealities blur, while concepts such as Crime and Poetry are incarnated as wondrous and terrible beings. But, Coffin Ada tells Dennis, if he does not return the book to this other London, he will be killed.
So begins Dennis' adventure in Long London. Delving deep into the city's occult underbelly and tarrying with an eccentric cast of sorcerers, gangsters, and murderers, Dennis finds himself at the center of an explosive series of events that may endanger both Londons.
Mystical, hilarious, and magnificently imagined, The Great When is an unforgettable introduction to the consciousness-altering world of Long London.
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| US edition |
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| Art by Nicolas Delort |
