Review: I Hear a New World by Alan Moore

In 2022, Alan Moore signed a Bloomsbury deal to write a five-book series. At the time Moore was excited, saying he bubbled with fiction (I paraphrase). A difficult feeling to sustain, Moore nevertheless delivered a sparkling, exuberant effort two years later in The Great When. An irreverent mix of Dickens, Joyce, and Aleister Crowley, Moore deployed his singular style on an alternate, mid-20th century London indeed, in bubbly fashion. But could Moore maintain the groove in 2026's I Hear a New World, second book in the series?

It takes a fun, meandering road, but I Hear a New World eventually picks up on the happenings of our weak-chinned hero, Dennis Knuckleyard. Roughly ten years after the events of The Great When, Dennis is still possessor of the key brought back from Long London, and in the early going, he uses an opportunity at a socialite party to pass possession to Joe Meek, a music producer. Meek's never the same after, and Dennis finds himself caught between an occult rock and octogenarian hard place.

For the reader unaware, Moore is a writer who puts the English dictionary through its paces. I Hear a New World is a smorgasbord of prose. Where good advice to a new writer is: be careful with those adjectives, Moore proves that, in the right motif and with the right voice, adjective overload can be an effective storytelling tool. Like The Great When, I Hear a New World is a dictional tour de force—Guy Ritchie on Aleister Crowley steroids.

The substance of the Long London series starts to emerge from the dark magic mists. Where The Great When was just a spot of excellent storytelling, I Hear a New World adds a dimension: time. It's set roughly a decade later, a time when ideas and elements emerge in British culture—Cold War, counter-culture, social justice, and others. To be clear, none of these are addressed in direct, overt fashion that will have the modern generation of reviewers happily ticking off woke checkboxes. Gay character, check. Female agency, check. Non-white representation, check. Rather, Moore seems to juxtapose perennial existence with existence in the present. The “present” changes with every new book in the series, but the doings and happenings in secret London go on, unchanged by comparison. It's interesting how this will be evolved in future books.

In the end, Alan Moore absolutely sustains the fever energy of The Great When in I Hear a New World. It doesn't turn the dial up to eleven, Moore already had the dial on twelve, such is the power of the narrative and style. The syntactical density is likely to turn off a certain readers, but for those who believe language is an art, and like to see it used painting a raunchy yet elegant, literary yet genre tale of mid-20th century London sliding across the surface of darker, older things, then have a go. Dickens never dreamed of this Pip and Mrs. Haversham...