Alan Moore has signed a five-volume epic fantasy series, as well as a collection of short fiction with Bloomsbury. According to The Guardian, the six-figure deal will kick off with Illuminations (the collection of short fiction in fall 2022), and will be followed by the Long London quintet, which the publisher describes as a “dazzlingly original and brimming with energy” of beguiling and elegantly crafted tales that reveal the full power of imagination and magic.”
Moore is famous for his work as a comic book author, particularly for his comics Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Batman: The Killing Joke, Swamp Thing, and others, and in 2019, retired from the medium after wrapping up The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. His career in comics was famously tempestuous: he’s just as well known for his dislike of adaptations of his work, and of his disagreements with companies like DC Comics, and he’s worked independently for a number of years.
Over the years, he’s branched out into prose as well: in 1996, he wrote a millennia-spanning novel called Voice of the Fire, and in 2016, published Jerusalem, a lengthy story (1,266 pages!) set in Northampton. With comics behind him, it looks as though Moore has big plans in prose fiction.
According to The Guardian, the series will begin in London 1949 to a “a version of London just beyond our knowledge” over those five volumes. The first installment will hit stores in 2024. In a statement, Moore says that he’s “bursting with fiction, bursting with prose” and that he “couldn’t be happier with the new home that I’ve found at Bloomsbury: a near-legendary independent publisher with a spectacular list and a fierce commitment to expanding the empire of the word.”
Photo “Alan Moore speaking at TAM London 2010” by Gaius Cornelius used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
