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Andy Sharp delivers a visionary field report based on fifteen years of deep vein creative research expeditions to England's strangest landscapes with a host of tragic players. Andy Sharp delivers a visionary field report based on fifteen years of deep-vein creative research expeditions to England's strangest landscapes with a host of tragic players. The English Heretic Collection is a visionary field report based on fifteen years of deep-vein travel to England's strangest landscapes - with a host of tragic players. Actors, witches and psychopaths maraud across a nightmare terrain of ominous stones and abandoned military bases, transforming creative research into a surreal documentary. Horror B-movies haunt the East Anglian countryside. Winston Churchill is inaugurated into the Ancient Order of the Druids. The suburbs of West London are home to psychedelic covens. From the red clays of rural horror to the outer regions of occultism, from the forensic vision of J.G. Ballard to the cauldron of The White Goddess, if history is revealed as a paranoid ritual, how do we escape its time traps to wild, new and imaginative geographies? Part countercultural history of England, part ghost story, and part magickal psychogeography, The English Heretic Collection is a darkly comical, urgently lyrical, mental escape hatch from the hells of our own making.… (more)
User reviews
English Heretic, amongst other things, proposes a series of Black Plaques, celebrating (?) sites where, say, Aleister Crowley performed a major ceremony; a classic horror film was shot; a puzzling murder took place; the attempted kidnapping of Princess Anne; J.G. Ballard's Shepperton home. Sharp weaves together fiction and history, real events and those depicted on film, making connections—or possible connections—ignored, obscured, or undiscovered by visiting locations and evoking these invisible lines through discussions of their history, the landscape, wordplay, and occult rituals (which also play a role in many of the events he discusses). Each "issue", bound together by some key idea, location, or person, also had an accompanying music/sound project, not included with the book (but available on Bandcamp).
It's difficult to know what to say about the book. It touches on all sorts of weird (wyrd?) ideas I've been tangentially interested in for much of my life, but have never taken all that seriously (e.g., conspiracy theories, "magick" & the occult in general, ghosts) despite the temptations to let go of reality, such as it is, and instead move to this arguably more interesting and meaningful universe. Thus, for the most part much of the book's content feels like nonsense to me—interesting and enjoyable nonsense, to be sure, but ultimately more like an imagined world than the mundane and meaningless one in which most of us live. But there's still a bit of wistful "what might have been" feeling—what if I'd plunged in wholeheartedly in my teens, suspending my much valued cynicism and surrendering to an occult journey to understand what was really going on in the world? What might that have been like?
It's not clear to me how much of these narratives Sharp actually believes, and how much is art. But whether the author or the reader believes is somewhat orthogonal to enjoying the stories. Real or not, they provide an entertaining and thought-provoking exploration of some of the world's mysterious history.