£4.00 – £6.50
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.
“Compelling, playful, and unsettling… To open this book is to open a gate leading to an England you always — but never before — knew existed.”
“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.”
“At last a compendium that documents the high wyrdness of English Heretic’s expeditions and research. The plausible links between seemingly unconnected events and people, the coincidences, the commemoration of nebulous action that by the very act of physical marking make them corporeal. Now that’s what I call hauntological and psychogeographical transubstantiation…”
“Andy Sharp is dangerous. An occult folklorist, he explores an alternate reality that seems to exist only in the underlit margins of pop culture. Through cross-examination of key esoteric texts, Sharp goes spelunking in this heretical underworld. The entities he reveals may be familiar, some repulsive, but once you submit to his method, there’s no escape to the surface, because this hell zone is life itself.”
“This, a compendium of Andy Sharp’s essays, travelogues and entertainments as English Heretic, is both scholarly in its analysis of the roots and branches of the forest that is the English ‘wyrd’ and fascinating for the generally curious. Beautifully written and alive with ideas, it’s a primer to a whole range of cultural tropes and historical contexts but also a working field guide to a haunted geography of the national psyche. It’s 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.”
