Reading two or more books at once is an often confusing but interesting thing to do, particularly if the two inform each other in amusing and/or startling ways, or if you can make a funny title out of combining them.
At the moment I’ve got Anno Dracula by Kim Newman and London Orbital by Iain Sinclair on the go (mainly because the former is too large to fit in my handbag and therefore is living on the coffee table). ‘Alternafictihistory’ is the genre that I have just invented to describe Kim Newman’s trilogy (of which this is the first book) based on the premise that Dracula survived to marry the widowed Queen Victoria and play merry hell with social structures and the British Empire by turning a load of people (hilariously including many fictional characters) into vampires and promoting them over the ‘warm’. Throw in Jack the Ripper (in the form of Dr Seward from Bram Stoker’s Dracula) offing vampire prostitutes messily in Whitechapel and this gels quite nicely with Sinclair’s characteristic London-centric spiel and atmospheric ramblings.
However, I’ve nearly finished Anno Dracula and am still plowing through the density of Sinclair, so my current peculiar mental synthesis will soon end, as London Orbital is just getting properly going, what with bitching about the Millennium Dome squatting on the prime meridian and tales of circumnavigating the M25 with Bill Drummond’s crazy white van man friend. What should I now read at home to further enhance my enjoyment of the bearded psychogeographer?