Strange Attractor Press
3 total works
Written in the early years of the twenty-first century, when the author was engaged in dream-explorations and mystical practices centered on the Greek Moon goddess Selene, Somnium is an intensely personal fictional tapestry that weaves together numerous historical and stylistic variations on the enduring myth of Selene and Endymion. Ranging through the sixteenth to twenty-first centuries, it combines medieval, Elizabethan, Gothic, and Decadent elements in a fantastic romance of rare imagination.
With its delirious and heartbroken narrative, Somnium is an extraordinary odyssey through love, loss, and lunacy, illuminated by the silvery moonlight of its exquisite language.
Alan Moore's afterword details the life of his friend and mentor Steve Moore, and includes the circumstances surrounding the writing of Somnium.
This new expanded paperback edition includes Sketches of Shooter's Hill, a topographical communiqué from the South London hinterlands that formed the liminal setting for Moore's novel. Originally self-published by the author and distributed only to a handful of friends, this curious travelogue is made available to readers here for the first time.
“A masterpiece.”
—Alan Moore
“A unique work by a unique genius. Moore has an understanding of the occult peculiar to a very few and it always gives me the shivers; the shivers which say 'authenticity.' Get this book while you're part of the minority who know about it.”—Michael Moorcock
“A visionary decrypting of one of fringe-London's most potent downriver sites. Steve Moore's voyage through plural strands of time echoes the high craft of his namesake, Alan, and the honourable tradition of Michael Moorcock's Gloriana.”
—Iain Sinclair
An examination of the myths of the Moon goddess and how she appeared to the original creators of those myths in ancient Greece.
Waxing and waning and reborn with each new month, the Moon has always been the supreme symbol of cyclical change in the western world.
Metaphorical representations of the Moon's goddess also seem to undergo similar changes, each new century reinventing her in its own image. For Hesiod, she was a distant figure in the celestial pantheon, to Keats she was an intimate muse; Selene's recurring role in music, literature, and song is a powerful testament to our continued fascination with her myth.
A deeply erudite and meticulously researched survey, this book explores the perennial curiosity our closest orbital neighbor continues to instill, providing at once an unprecedented body of historical research and a critical armature for the author's lauded prose reverie Somnium.
Despite the importance of the Moon to recent developments in esoteric scholarship and mythography, Selene doesn't attempt to present a "Moon-Goddess for the twenty-first century," but rather looks at the myths of one specific Moon goddess and how she appeared to the original creators of those myths in the literature of ancient Greece.
In doing so, Selene marks the point at which classical scholarship comes closest to a physical embrace with its ethereal subject matter.
"An impeccable and flawlessly researched piece of classical scholarship."
-Alan Moore