A penny dreadful for £2.50* featuring tales of folklore and horror stories from another London.
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A penny dreadful for £2.50* featuring tales of folklore and horror stories from another London.
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One eye grey is the first of a planned series of publications relating to London folklore and horror featuring modern stories based on traditional London tales of the uncanny, paranormal and supernatural. It is a penny dreadful for £2.50 that draws on the tradition of those early London publications as well as the pulp fiction that followed in the 20th century. There will be three parts to One Eye Grey, with the first section (Transpontine Drift ) out in February 2007. Part two (A goose in Southwark) which contains a more ghostly selection of London stories will follow in June 2007. The final episode (Out of the orbital) of these interlinked tales will be out in time for Halloween 2007. Extra stories will be released on this website to supplement and coincide with each part and each part will contain at least five short London stories linked together by a larger tale which leaves a nice cliff-hanger (because we do like a cliff-hanger) at the end of the first two sections.
Aside from ratty in the rest of Transpontine Drift you'll find shape shifters in Shepherds Bush, pagan estate agents, a basilisk breeding programme in Rotherhithe alongside other strange tales and facts from the metropolis. These stories are woven together by a group of modern Londoners who are meeting up after a funeral and forced to confront elements of the past that refuse to lie still. Based on traditional London lore and legends they bring to life a London nobody knew was still there by setting modern urban concerns against a backdrop of the older myths.
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One eye grey the other blue: Stories from another London
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One Eye Grey is a penny dreadful for the 21st century and is the beginning of a planned series of publications that retell London folktales and ghost stories in a contemporary setting. The three parts of this first serial will be released at significant dates in the occult calendar starting in February 2007 (Imbolc), then June (Solstice) and finally Halloween so that by 31st October the whole story will be told. One Eye Grey is a nod to the cockney legend of the Queen Rat, a sexy rodent able to transform herself into a raven haired lovely in order to seduce handsome dockside workers. Alongside this very different Ratty from the one in Wind in the Willows you'll find shape shifters in Shepherds Bush, loreleis at the lido, pagan estate agents and a basilisk breeding programme in Rotherhithe. Carl Gee, who rather appropriately has disappeared himself at the moment, presents these strange tales from the metropolis and introduces the reader to some of his friends. One Eye Grey is the first publishing venture by F and M since Heavy Words Lightly Thrown gained global publicity in 2004 and brings together many of the same talents behind both that and the later Cross River Traffic project. Most of the words are by Chris Roberts, the illustrations and design by Sophie Burdess and the photographs by Ben Amure. All of whom thought that the time was right for something chilling and pocket sized to read on the tube. As to the cover fee of £2.50, we did want to charge a penny but the cost of delivery urchins has skyrocketed of late, not to mention shocking increases in the price of paper, ink, laudanum etc. |