Another magician is Alan Moore. Heart-Shaped Box is prefaced with a quote from Moore’s novel Voice Of The Fire. It’s fair to say that both he and Gaiman have shaped a climate that makes it much easier for writers like Hill to re-infiltrate the mainstream.
“Absolutely. I think that Alan Moore is one of the four or five great writers of his generation. That might sound like exaggeration, but I really think he is one of the great literary voices. I’ve read him my whole life, I think I probably read my first Alan Moore comic when I was 13 or 14, and so his voice has been there in my imagination for decades now. Voice Of The Fire is a brilliant piece of work, really terribly overlooked.
“Probably the keystone work of Don DeLillo’s career was Underworld, and in a lot of ways Voice Of The Fire is the same kind of book, only it’s better. It does the same thing, it tells the secret history of a place across a long stretch of history, but it tells real honest to god stories, whereas Underworld kinda tells pieces of stories, which is sort of a literary cheat. I mean, I’m not ten per cent of the writer Don DeLillo is, and I loved Underworld, but you know what I’m saying: one way to attain literary credibility is to only tell part of a story and not really lower yourself to tell a full tale.
“I think a lot of people feel like the peak of Alan Moore’s career was Watchmen, but I think he’s done even better work since; League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen has been remarkable. Someone asked me if I had done a lot of research on the south, ’cos that’s where the book heads, and I said, ‘No, not really, but I did read all of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing comics!’ That’s why Jude’s hometown is Moore’s Corner, because it’s Alan Moore’s south. So my version has nothing to do with the real south. I don’t think Alan Moore’s been to Louisiana either, I just think he did his best from Northampton!”
Heart-Shaped Box is published by Gollancz.
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Peter Murphy 
