The English Heretic Collection – Andy Sharp
The English Heretic Collection: Ritual Histories, Magickal Geography by Andy Sharp / ISBN 9781913462093 / An attractive 472-page paperback from the Repeater Books (UK)
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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.
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.
“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.” – Stuart Maconie
“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.”
– Marcus Williamson, journalist and contributor to The International Encyclopaedia of Surrealism