Clive Bloom is the perfect guide to London's uncanny, gothic side … [He] takes us wherever his mind takes him, which makes for some twisty-turny paths indeed … At times, Bloom's ability to draw connections between different phenomena, between different parts of the city, is itself uncanny.

Prospect

Engaging, strange and suitably mind-altering.

SFX Magazine

London Uncanny is a fascinating journey through the stranger byways of the capital, as depicted through literature, and embodied in many of its most fascinating inhabitants, from David Bowie and Alesteir Crowley to TS Eliot and even the 'ghosts' of ABBA. It's an engrossing, sometimes dizzying, ride, full of hidden surprises and insights.

Choice, March 2025 books round-up

Eclectic and pleasantly disorientating.

BBC History Magazine

Richer in its findings than double cream at Twinings' 300-year-old teahouse on Strand, incantatory in its prose as sounds of choir at St. Paul's, this journey from pre-eminent Gothic scholar Clive Bloom roams and records his home city of London. He explores with ample evidence why London is an outsider island within the kingdom it administers. Bloom's command for its past and its personalities, and respect for its mystifying nature, is astonishing. On every corner, on every foggy street, something revelatory happened that we did not know, and which changes what we did know regarding the base of Britannia. Prophets and apostates, prostitutes and poets, politicians and psychologists, psychics and pretenders of all stripes - sometimes on the same street - acted or were acted upon, feeding the collective artistic, criminal, paranormal, and intellectual history of London. Not just a guide book, not purely a history of place, this volume is something more: a communion between the London flaneur and this City's surreal and haunting nature. London Uncanny does for the strange past of this Capital's streets what Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere did for its fictional life below them-reveals the secret life.

Danel Olson, Chairperson of the Committee for the Bram Stoker Award and author of The Gothic War on Terror author of The Gothic War on Terror

Spied through a glass darkly, Clive Bloom's compelling and unique vision of London is revealed to be an uncanny space and cityscape of the weird. In this alternative guide, he will lead you to where the fog is thickest, a portal to an upside-down world of fantastic imaginings, eccentrics past and present, spooks and spiritualists and to the heart of an inner darkness. After reading this scintillating book, London will never be the same again!

Professor Marie Mulvey-Roberts, author of Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal, winner of the Allan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize