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Герои романа путешествуют во времени из современного восточного Лондона в криминальные трущобы эры Джека Потрошителя. Алхимия, магические трансформации, психогеографические изыскания и проституция, вампиризм, каннибализм, некромантия - темы этого экспериментального романа, построенного и соответствии с концепцией постмодернистского анти-нарратива. В этом произведении также раскрывается истинная сущность Джека Потрошителя.
160 pages, Hardcover
First published July 15, 2004
2 people are currently reading
71 people want to read
About the author
Stewart Home
95 books288 followersStewart Home (born London 1963) is an English writer, satirist and artist. He is best known for novels such as the non-narrative "69 Things to Do With A Dead Princess" (2002), his re-imagining of the 1960s in "Tainted Love" (2005), and more recent books such as "She's My Witch" (2020) that use pulp and avant-garde tropes to parody conventional literature.
Home's unusual approach to writing is reflected in the readings he gives from his novels: he recites from memory, utilises ventriloquism, stands on his head and declaims his work and even shreds his own books.
Home's first book "The Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War" (Aporia Press and Unpopular Books, London, 1988) is an underground art history sketching continuations of dadist and surrealist influences on post-World War II fringe radical art.
Home's first novel "Pure Mania" was published 1989 (Polygon Books), and details a violent neo-punk subculture. Unmistakenly postmodern but nfluenced by surrealism and the nouveau roman, it pushes the appropriation of pulp tropes and use of repetition found within historical avant-garde fiction to such an extreme that some critics mistook it for a piece of low-brow writing.
Home continued in much the same vein with his next four novels, starting with "Defiant Pose" (Peter Owen, 1991) and continuing with "Red London" (AK Press 1994), "Blow Job" (published in 1997 but written in 1994) and Slow Death (Serpent's Tail 1996).
All Home’s early fiction collages in large amounts of prose from a wide variety of sources – and while it is often close in spirit to the work of ‘postmodern extremists’ such as Kathy Acker, the appropriated material is much more heavily reworked than in the latter’s books.
The novels Home wrote after the mid-nineties featured less subcultural material than his earlier books and focus more obviously on issues of form and aesthetics. Home’s sixth novel "Come Before Christ And Murder Love" (Serpent's Tail 1997) featured a schizophrenic narrator whose personality changed every time he had an orgasm. This was the first novel Home wrote in the first person, and much of the fiction he wrote after this utilised the device of an unreliable first-person narrator.
"Cunt" (Do Not Press 1999) is a postmodern take on the picaresque novel. "69 Things to Do With A Dead Princess" (Canongate 2002) mixes porn with capsule reviews of dozens of obscure books as well as elaborate descriptions of stone circles, while in "Down and Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton" (Do Not Press 2004) every paragraph is exactly 100 words long. "Tainted Love" (Virgin Books) is based on the life of the author's mother, who was part of the London subcultural scene in the 1960s. "Memphis Underground" (Snow Books 2007) has a long conventional literary opening that is slowly unravelled.
Home’s 2010 novel "Blood Rites of the Bourgeois" (Book Works) is to date his only work written in the second person. The plot – as far as there is one - concerns an artist hacking the computers of London’s cultural elite to infect them with modified penis enlargement spam. Reviewing Home’s incredibly weird campus novel "Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane" (Penny-Ante Editions 2013) for The Guardian, Nicholas Lezard observes: “I think one of the great virtues of Home's work is the way it forces us to address our own complacency.”
"The 9 Lives of Ray The Cat Jones" (Test Centre 2014) is a fictional exploration of the life of one of the author's more infamous criminal relatives. "She's My Witch" (London Books 2020), is a love story exploring an unlikely relationship between a fitness instructor and a heroin addicted witch. "Art School Orgy" (New Reality Records, 2023) is a 'BDSM extravaganza'. Before this Home published his collected poems "SEND CA$H" (Morbid Books 2018) and a book about martial arts films "Re-Enter The Dragon: Genre Theory, Brucesploitation & The Sleazy Joys of Lowbrow Cinema" (Ledatape 2018).
Home's unusual approach to writing is reflected in the readings he gives from his novels: he recites from memory, utilises ventriloquism, stands on his head and declaims his work and even shreds his own books.
Home's first book "The Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War" (Aporia Press and Unpopular Books, London, 1988) is an underground art history sketching continuations of dadist and surrealist influences on post-World War II fringe radical art.
Home's first novel "Pure Mania" was published 1989 (Polygon Books), and details a violent neo-punk subculture. Unmistakenly postmodern but nfluenced by surrealism and the nouveau roman, it pushes the appropriation of pulp tropes and use of repetition found within historical avant-garde fiction to such an extreme that some critics mistook it for a piece of low-brow writing.
Home continued in much the same vein with his next four novels, starting with "Defiant Pose" (Peter Owen, 1991) and continuing with "Red London" (AK Press 1994), "Blow Job" (published in 1997 but written in 1994) and Slow Death (Serpent's Tail 1996).
All Home’s early fiction collages in large amounts of prose from a wide variety of sources – and while it is often close in spirit to the work of ‘postmodern extremists’ such as Kathy Acker, the appropriated material is much more heavily reworked than in the latter’s books.
The novels Home wrote after the mid-nineties featured less subcultural material than his earlier books and focus more obviously on issues of form and aesthetics. Home’s sixth novel "Come Before Christ And Murder Love" (Serpent's Tail 1997) featured a schizophrenic narrator whose personality changed every time he had an orgasm. This was the first novel Home wrote in the first person, and much of the fiction he wrote after this utilised the device of an unreliable first-person narrator.
"Cunt" (Do Not Press 1999) is a postmodern take on the picaresque novel. "69 Things to Do With A Dead Princess" (Canongate 2002) mixes porn with capsule reviews of dozens of obscure books as well as elaborate descriptions of stone circles, while in "Down and Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton" (Do Not Press 2004) every paragraph is exactly 100 words long. "Tainted Love" (Virgin Books) is based on the life of the author's mother, who was part of the London subcultural scene in the 1960s. "Memphis Underground" (Snow Books 2007) has a long conventional literary opening that is slowly unravelled.
Home’s 2010 novel "Blood Rites of the Bourgeois" (Book Works) is to date his only work written in the second person. The plot – as far as there is one - concerns an artist hacking the computers of London’s cultural elite to infect them with modified penis enlargement spam. Reviewing Home’s incredibly weird campus novel "Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane" (Penny-Ante Editions 2013) for The Guardian, Nicholas Lezard observes: “I think one of the great virtues of Home's work is the way it forces us to address our own complacency.”
"The 9 Lives of Ray The Cat Jones" (Test Centre 2014) is a fictional exploration of the life of one of the author's more infamous criminal relatives. "She's My Witch" (London Books 2020), is a love story exploring an unlikely relationship between a fitness instructor and a heroin addicted witch. "Art School Orgy" (New Reality Records, 2023) is a 'BDSM extravaganza'. Before this Home published his collected poems "SEND CA$H" (Morbid Books 2018) and a book about martial arts films "Re-Enter The Dragon: Genre Theory, Brucesploitation & The Sleazy Joys of Lowbrow Cinema" (Ledatape 2018).
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
May 24, 2012
"Everybody knows who Stewart Home is by now. Everyone, that is, in the East End Wetherspoons pubs where the author lurks in fear of having to buy his own drinks.
This is the title from the prolific spender that's so anti anti-atrocious that the defunct publisher (defunct, that is, because of this book-POSSIBLY) must have given the unsold copies back to Home to sell off at his readings rather than spend any cash having them pulped.
Having sold precisely one of these copies (to me in 2004 at a reading in a Highbury dive), Home was, by 2008, reduced to giving them away as gifts (he offered my girlfriend one and after multiple attempts to leave it at the pub, it's now down the back of her Brixton bookcase).
Finding, by 2010, that even this was a hiding to nothing, the hapless Home has, at last ditch, recently been shredding the books at 'performances' and making them into 'Art'.
In this he has finally succeeded himself as the DeQuincey of something or t'other as the resulting works eclipse the entire gamut of recent Young British Art.
A masterpiece"
Michael K, Internotional Times
This is the title from the prolific spender that's so anti anti-atrocious that the defunct publisher (defunct, that is, because of this book-POSSIBLY) must have given the unsold copies back to Home to sell off at his readings rather than spend any cash having them pulped.
Having sold precisely one of these copies (to me in 2004 at a reading in a Highbury dive), Home was, by 2008, reduced to giving them away as gifts (he offered my girlfriend one and after multiple attempts to leave it at the pub, it's now down the back of her Brixton bookcase).
Finding, by 2010, that even this was a hiding to nothing, the hapless Home has, at last ditch, recently been shredding the books at 'performances' and making them into 'Art'.
In this he has finally succeeded himself as the DeQuincey of something or t'other as the resulting works eclipse the entire gamut of recent Young British Art.
A masterpiece"
Michael K, Internotional Times
August 4, 2020
Emperors new clothes indeed, someone else on Goodreads described this as 'dog shit on toast' - couldn't begin to better that particular review.
The book is a lazy, dull and portentous wank fest.
Do Not Press do not publish books any more which is a shame as they were clever innovative and smart. Down & Out being an exception.
The book is a lazy, dull and portentous wank fest.
Do Not Press do not publish books any more which is a shame as they were clever innovative and smart. Down & Out being an exception.
November 13, 2025
A depraved, and at times repetitive, ride through the sewers of sex work that features Jack the Ripper, snuff films, a time-traveling William S Burroughs, and Henry James as you’ve never seen him before. Each paragraph is exactly 100 words long. No chapters. No dialog. Just an unending rush with a narrator who affirms: "There is a delicacy about a woman metering her twat."
March 2, 2019
Horrible. Too long. No pictures. 4 stars.
July 16, 2019
Heerlijk geschift & opwindend verontrustend.
September 21, 2011
I note that a character called "Rozzer" has afforded this book two stars too, which is hardly surprising from a member of Her Majesty's Police Force - but he isn't far wrong. For all the appeal of the title for someone like me who has spent a good part of the past 4 years working in said London districts as well as the warm recommendations of that marvellous psychogeographer Iain Sinclair, this is a bit of a dud.
A quick run through some of the bars of Hoxton circa 2004 apart (expect minus The Foundry - disappointingly), the action of the novel is actually situated largely to the east - the well travelled Spitalfields, Whitechapel and Bethnal Green beloved by Sinclair, Home and their coterie.
Jack the Ripper is of course a protagonist - albeit in an unconvincing theory formulated by a prostitute's "John" that he and Henry James were one and the same - and indeed, trick turning features heavily - a central attempt to create a snuff movie has all the deadening mundanity of the murders listed by Roberto Bolaño in 2066 . Rather predictably, it all veers off into la la land towards the end. Missable.
A quick run through some of the bars of Hoxton circa 2004 apart (expect minus The Foundry - disappointingly), the action of the novel is actually situated largely to the east - the well travelled Spitalfields, Whitechapel and Bethnal Green beloved by Sinclair, Home and their coterie.
Jack the Ripper is of course a protagonist - albeit in an unconvincing theory formulated by a prostitute's "John" that he and Henry James were one and the same - and indeed, trick turning features heavily - a central attempt to create a snuff movie has all the deadening mundanity of the murders listed by Roberto Bolaño in 2066 . Rather predictably, it all veers off into la la land towards the end. Missable.
Read
November 29, 2008There are rare instances where I feel that the world is a worse place because of the existence of a certain book. Down and Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton is one such experience. I like Stewart Home as an activist artist, as the prankster guru of Neoism. This book is dogshit on toast. I am, admittedly judging it from only having read the first 30 pages or so. If it blossoms into dazzling brilliance after that, someone please give me notice. I'll take another look.
February 19, 2014
Great read! sort of like a sequel to '69 things to do with a dead princess' as narrated by a psychotic hooker and ends up becoming an occultist Jess Franco movie. Home is the master of 'dirty unrealism'!
December 27, 2011
There is more information about this book at the following link: http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/gas...
December 19, 2014
I'm still reeling. I can't tell if it confused me or not, maybe a second read will be more enlightening.
August 23, 2013
a bit tedious, even though I know some of the places mentioned
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews