Description
Book SynopsisFrom its inaugural Black Plaque in honour of Witchfinder General director Michael Reeves, this unique collection follows a veridical trajectory to the frontiers of belief. Reeves' film becomes a conspiratorial cauldron drawing in a host of tragic players in the end game of the Sixties. The Cornwall of Du Maurier's The Birds is ploughed to reveal the hidden psychic codes of our Blitz spirit. In a powerfully relevant occult rendering of a bruised Island, the myth of Churchill is dissected and re-animalised. New maps of hell are drawn by colliding the forensic vision of JG Ballard and Lovecraftian magic. Actors, witches and psychopaths maraud across a nightmare terrain of murderous henges and abandoned military bases; conflating creative research into a surreal documentary, history as hallucination. Geography becomes an alchemical alembic, a vale of soul-making distilled by the lysergic psychobiology of Stanislav Grof, the alcoholic lyricism of Malcolm Lowry, and the convulsive travelogues of the Marquis de Sade. If history is revealed as paranoid ritual, how do we escape its time traps to wild new imaginative geographies? The English Heretic collection is a darkly comical, urgently lyrical, mental escape hatch from the hells of our own making.
Trade Review"Compelling, playful, and unsettling... To open this book is to open a gate leading to an England you always — but never before — knew existed."
"The English Heretic Collection is a tour de force through contemporary occult and popular culture, a madly spinning windmill of the mind. It’s a work that leaves the reader haunted by the multitude of interconnections that cram its pages, forcing a stark re-evaluation of former certainties."
"At last a compendium that documents the high wyrdness of English Heretic's expeditions and research. Now that's what I call hauntological and psychogeographical transubstantiation..."
"Andy Sharp is dangerous. An occult folklorist, he explores an alternate reality that seems to exist only in the underlit margins of pop culture. The entities he reveals may be familiar, some repulsive, but once you submit to his method, there’s no escape to the surface, because this hell zone is life itself."
"This is an alternative England, one of decommissioned nuclear bunkers, abandoned villages and creepy public information films, an England where the shadow on the horizon could be a signpost but might be a gibbet.”
