Andy Sharp

English Heretic takes its name fromEnglish Heritage, one of the two major organizations looking after historic buildings and sites in England. (The other is the National Trust, which also has sites in Wales and Northern Ireland.). English Heritage takes care of stately homes, gardens, castles, battlegrounds, Stonehenge, and the like. It also runs the London Blue Plaque program, which places blue plaques celebrating the famous and their associated sites, so, for example, Charles Dickens's house has one, as does Richard Arkwright, J.M. Barrie, and many more.

English Heretic, amongst other things, proposes a series of Black Plaques, celebrating (?) sites where, say, Aleister Crowley performed a major ceremony; a classic horror film was shot; a puzzling murder took place; the attempted kidnapping of Princess Anne; J.G. Ballard's Shepperton home. Sharp weaves together fiction and history, real events and those depicted on film, making connections—or possible connections—ignored, obscured, or undiscovered by visiting locations and evoking these invisible lines through discussions of their history, the landscape, wordplay, and occult rituals (which also play a role in many of the events he discusses). Each "issue", bound together by some key idea, location, or person, also had an accompanying music/sound project, not included with the book (but available on Bandcamp).

It's difficult to know what to say about the book. It touches on all sorts of weird (wyrd?) ideas I've been tangentially interested in for much of my life, but have never taken all that seriously (e.g., conspiracy theories, "magick" & the occult in general, ghosts) despite the temptations to let go of reality, such as it is, and instead move to this arguably more interesting and meaningful universe. Thus, for the most part much of the book's content feels like nonsense to me—interesting and enjoyable nonsense, to be sure, but ultimately more like an imagined world than the mundane and meaningless one in which most of us live. But there's still a bit of wistful "what might have been" feeling—what if I'd plunged in wholeheartedly in my teens, suspending my much valued cynicism and surrendering to an occult journey to understand what was really going on in the world? What might that have been like?

It's not clear to me how much of these narratives Sharp actually believes, and how much is art. But whether the author or the reader believes is somewhat orthogonal to enjoying the stories. Real or not, they provide an entertaining and thought-provoking exploration of some of the world's mysterious history.… (meer)