From an alarming little revenge love-story, ‘Hypothetical Lizard’, a straightforward ghost story, ‘Cold Reading’ and an apocalyptic battle in ‘Location Location Location’, to the 242-page takedown of the comics industry, ‘What Can We Know About Thunderman’. And I do like to show off!”Įach of the nine stories in Illuminations is startling different. “I was trying to play around with different styles, presentations, and subject matter to show that I do have a certain amount of range. Moore says he tried to make the collection as diverse as possible. It is exhilarating to get your teeth into an idea and complete it in a couple of weeks.” Smorgasbord of styles, themes You can be playful and take chances with a short story. “The experiments or effects that you are thinking of might not be enough to sustain a novel. One can experiment with the short story in a way that one cannot in a novel.

You have to create the situation, all of your characters, make them credible, develop those characters and situations and then bring them to a hopefully satisfying or surprising conclusion.” “In it you have to do all the things that you would do in a massive, sprawling novel, in a restricted space. The short story, Moore believes is the best way for anyone to learn their craft.

“I had not done very many of them as I was distracted by the comics industry ( laughs). The decision to put together a collection of short stories, Moore says was made a couple of years ago. “I prefer to stay in the 20th Century without a smart phone or Internet connection, because that is where I am the most comfortable,” the 69-year-old author said from home in Northampton, UK, “sitting in my usual chair, by my usual window in my usual town.”Īfter the gigantic 1,266-page novel, Jerusalem, Moore felt he needed to do something different and that is how the short story collection, Illuminations (Bloomsbury), was born.

Talking to Alan Moore, the magical mind behind iconic comic books including From Hell, Watchmen and The Killing Joke, is like being in an alternate universe.

A game of thrones novel