 “There is London Cognita, and London Incognita, and I know where I belong. It won’t be long now.” In his debut collection The Hollow Shores (2017), Gary Budden established himself as a crucial new voice in Weird fiction. Budden’s stories mix landscape writing, punk aesthetics and a profound understanding of how the uncanny manifests in the quotidian to create a powerful and unique voice. London Incognita (2020) is a more than worthy follow up, a confirmation of Budden’s particular talents and one of the key works of Weird fiction released this year. Whilst The Hollow Shores roamed across the south of England and even into Finland, London Incognita sees Budden focus his gaze on the Capital, engaging with the long history of London Weird to produce a timely and critical weighing of the city’s soul. London Incognita takes its name from Arthur Machen’s The London Adventure (1924), which Budden quotes in the epigraph, referring to the lesser known, hidden London that exists behind the London Cognita of Piccadilly Circus and Oxford Street. The stories in this book are linked by this idea of a hidden, obscure London, one that exists outside of the consensus reality of tourists and suits, inhabited equally by the dispossessed and the mythological, glimpse through the corner of the eye. Budden’s stories give us a streets-eye view, from the perspective of punk musicians and writers, recovering junkies, the ghosts of abused women, urban explorers, bailiffs. Characters on the margins, those who are able to read the signs of London Incognita, or have accidentally caught haunting glimpses. Revelation and transcendence await those who can decipher the signals, but there is always a high price to pay. Budden’s spare writing brilliantly captures the landscapes he describes – areas of London fallen into ruin, abandoned high rises and construction works, dingy back alleys, the miles of lost or abandoned tunnels and disused underground stations snaking under the city. He is very much aware of the city as a palimpsest – London is always being physically and psychically written and rewritten, both by the waves of redevelopment and collapse, gentrification and decay, and by the lives of those who live, dream and die in the city. He is a master at capturing the oddness of everyday life. The Weird for Budden exists as something glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, a presence or lack felt during walks through the city, memories, fixations and fears given momentary form. London Incognita is haunted by those who go missing, who disappear through the cracks of the vast indifferent city. It is harrowed by the repressed drives, the urges society finds unacceptable, the sicknesses that lie beneath respectable facades. The Weird comes from us, we inhabit it. London Incognita is a work in dialogue with the long tradition of the London Weird, one which Budden is very much aware of. His characters seek out those representations of the city that resonates with the alienation and strange beauty that they experience in their day to day lives. Machen is a strong influence and recurring reference point, but so is Michael Moorcock’s Mother London (1988), with its mysteries sacred and profane hidden in everyday lives, and the hints of gnostic mysteries lurking just round the corner in M. John Harrison’s The Course of the Heart (1991) and Signs of Life (1996). Budden is aware of how these overlapping fictions contribute to the mythology of London. His characters are obsessed with these stories plus fictional ones invented by Budden, which build up an image of London as a place haunted, where the violence of the present and the past can erupt into revenants spectral or more physical. London Incognita’s invented mythology, from Malachite Press and its roster of authors such as C. L. Nolan and Hecate Shrike, as well as landscape punk band Scart and their chronicler Melissa Eider who publishes short stories in her fanzine Magnesium Burns, all help to create a palimpsest, mosaic narrative. Excerpts from fictional novels and short stories occur and recur like the shifting cast of loosely associated characters. Thus, London Incognita, like London itself, exists as a collage of memory and myth, fact and fiction, all adding up to something greater than the sum of its parts. One could argue whether or not London Incognita is a collection of linked stories, or a mosaic novel. It certainly feels to me like a work with a more unified purpose than The Hollow Shores. The stories here, many of which have been published independently, all can stand by themselves. But taken together, we get a look at London across 50 odd years of history, through the eyes of various members of the Eider family. Brothers Danny and Gary Eider’s obsession with their mythological, hidden side of London in the 1970s eventually consumes both of them, in the Shirley Jackson Award-shortlisted ‘Judderman’. Decades later, in 2019, Melissa Eider, their great niece, puts together an exhibition for the 20th anniversary of Magnesium Burns, which chronicles the mythology she has explored in her own version of London. Whilst Danny and Gary experience all the evils of the city as the malevolent judderman, Melissa imagines the commare, a vengeful female spirit who stands for all the women who have suffered and died in London, a part of London Incognita hidden from Danny and Garry because of their gendered assumptions at the time. The thematic links across all these stories is London’s lost and forgotten, the unseen and the avoided. Budden’s book explores how the story of London cannot be told without telling the stories of these people. As such, underneath its explorations of the uncanny and unsettling is a very real human core of grief and loss. It is this that gives Budden’s work its heart, and its political thrust, as we share Budden’s anger at a society where austerity and solipsism has led to so many people becoming abandoned and forgotten. This fierce engagement with the real life effects of late period capitalism and neoliberalism runs through London Incognita and makes it such a powerful and troubling read. Budden is a writer at the top of his game who reflects the world around us back at us in profound and provoking ways, and I eagerly await his next project.  London Incognita chronicles a city caught in the cycle of perpetual decline and continuous renewal: the English capital, groaning under the weight of two-thousand years of history, as seen through the eyes of its desperate and troubled inhabitants. A malicious presence from the 1970s resurfaces in the fevered alleyways of the city; an amnesiac goddess offers brittle comfort to the spirits of murdered shop-girls; and an obscure and forgotten London writer holds the key to a thing known as the emperor worm. As bombs detonate and buildings burn down, the city's selfish inhabitants hunt the ghosts of friends, family and lovers to the urban limits of the metropolis, uncovering the dark secrets of London. Further Reading WEIRD HORROR FOR WEIRD TIMES: DAN COXON & GARY BUDDEN IN CONVERSATION BOOK REVIEW: ONLY THE BROKEN REMAIN BY DAN COXON   Comments are closed.
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