TEXTURE INTERVIEWS ALAN MOORE

My mammoth Alan Moore interview has just been published over at The Skinny. It's an absolute beast! We talked about his spoken word / music collaboration Unearthings, his Lovecraftian horror comic Neonomicon, his counter-cultural magazine Dodgem Logic, and a whole heap of other subjects... here's a taster of Moore talking about Neonomicon - click through for the full article. I'll be posting the transcript (and later the audio) of the interview on Weaponizer next week.

“I wanted to do a story that modernised Lovecraft – that didn’t rely upon that 1930s atmosphere – and that modernised him successfully, at least in my opinion. I suppose I was also thinking that it would be nice if you could bring some of the naturalism of shows like HBO’s The Wire to the impossible. Because that show has got such believability and naturalism, that it struck me that would be a very good way of approaching something so inherently fantastic and unbelievable as H.P. Lovecraft. That was one of the initial ideas. Another one was to actually put back some of the objectionable elements that Lovecraft himself censored, or that people since Lovecraft, who have been writing pastiches, have decided to leave out. Like the racism, the anti-Semitism, the sexism, the sexual phobias which are kind of apparent in all of Lovecraft’s slimy phallic or vaginal monsters.


This is a horror of the physical with Lovecraft – so I wanted to put that stuff back in. And also, Lovecraft was sexually squeamish; would only talk of ‘certain nameless rituals.’ Or he’d use some euphemism: ‘blasphemous rites.’ It was pretty obvious, given that a lot of his stories detailed the inhuman offspring of these ‘blasphemous rituals’ that sex was probably involved somewhere along the line. But that never used to feature in Lovecraft’s stories, except as a kind of suggested undercurrent. So I thought, let’s put all of the unpleasant racial stuff back in, let’s put sex back in. Let’s come up with some genuinely ‘nameless rituals’- let’s give them a name. So those were the precepts that it started out from, and I decided to follow wherever the story lead. It is one of the most unpleasant stories I have ever written. It certainly wasn’t intended as my farewell to comics, but that is perhaps how it has ended up. It is one of the blackest, most misanthropic pieces that I’ve ever done. I was in a very, very bad mood.”

Thanks to Alan Moore for doing me the huge honour of giving me an hour of his time - it was genuinely inspiring talking to him! Also, massive thanks to Dave Kerr of The Skinny for arranging the interview, and passing it to me.