Andy Sharp delivers a visionary field report based on fifteen years of deep-vein creative research expeditions to England's strangest landscapes with a host of tragic players.
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." - Christopher Josiffe, Fortean Times news editor and author of Gef! The Strange Tale of an Extra-Special Talking Mongoose
"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." - Marcus Williamson, journalist and contributor to The International Encyclopaedia of Surrealism
"At last a compendium that documents the high wyrdness of English Heretic's expeditions and research. Now that's what I call hauntological and psychogeographical transubstantiation..." - Drew Mulholland
"Andy Sharp is dangerous. An occult folklorist, he explores an alternate reality that seems to exist only in the underlit margins of pop culture. 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." - Simon Sellars, author of Applied Ballardianism: Memoir from a Parallel Universe
"This is 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.” - Stuart Maconie
Andy Sharp is a writer and multimedia artist. Since 2003, he has worked on English Heretic, an autonomous creative research project. Pioneering the form of literary and aural aesthetics, he has released over a dozen albums and booklets. He has talked at academic conferences and counter-cultural events on a wide range of subjects drawn from his research. He has an Msc in Neuroscience from Kings College and lives in London.
Andy Sharp delivers a visionary field report based on fifteen years of deep-vein creative research expeditions to England's strangest landscapes with a host of tragic players.
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.
Praise
"Compelling, playful, and unsettling... To open this book is to open a gate leading to an England you always — but never before — knew existed." - Christopher Josiffe, Fortean Times news editor and author of Gef! The Strange Tale of an Extra-Special Talking Mongoose
"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." - Marcus Williamson, journalist and contributor to The International Encyclopaedia of Surrealism
"At last a compendium that documents the high wyrdness of English Heretic's expeditions and research. Now that's what I call hauntological and psychogeographical transubstantiation..." - Drew Mulholland
"Andy Sharp is dangerous. An occult folklorist, he explores an alternate reality that seems to exist only in the underlit margins of pop culture. 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." - Simon Sellars, author of Applied Ballardianism: Memoir from a Parallel Universe
"This is 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.” - Stuart Maconie
Author
Andy Sharp is a writer and multimedia artist. Since 2003, he has worked on English Heretic, an autonomous creative research project. Pioneering the form of literary and aural aesthetics, he has released over a dozen albums and booklets. He has talked at academic conferences and counter-cultural events on a wide range of subjects drawn from his research. He has an Msc in Neuroscience from Kings College and lives in London.
