Between the late 1970s and the early 1990s, Jonathan Bowden wrote 27 books, about which almost nothing was known until after his death. Combining cultural criticism with memoir, high journalism, and selected correspondence, these texts belong to no particular genre, the prose being allowed to roam where it may, drawing from many strands, fi nding unexpected links, and collecting shrewd insights along the way. More than anything, they are exercises in exploration and selfclarification, wherein one will fi nd, as work in progress, many of the themes that would later emerge in his orations. The Jonathan Bowden Collection aims at making these obscure texts readily available for the fi rst time, complete with annotations and indices, so that they may be studied and / or enjoyed by present and future generations interested in the dissidents at the margins of British intellectual life at the turn of our century.
Written during the Spring of 1993, Jonathan begins with a commentary on a Deathlok comic, going vignette by vignette, which leads him onto a prescient discussion of the prospect of resurgent authoritarianism through technology in the liberal state. Deathlok's world of urban blight then recalls a visit to the Isle of Sheppey, told in cinematic detail. And from there Jonathan dedicates the rest of the volume to a wide-ranging discussion-always through the prism of right and left-of religion, magic, and the occult, paying particular attention to Christianity, paganism, and Satanism, and touching on Alister Crowley, Anton LaVey, and the novels of British occult writer Dennis Wheatley. An interesting volume spanning from the modern and the popular, to the ancient and the transcendent.
