I was born at the full moon atop a crescent-shaped hill, the main mineral found here (on Shooter’s Hill) being selenite, and I have a slightly rough-edged crescent birthmark on my left forearm … so I was obviously destined to be either a werewolf or a lunatic…
My first attempt at handling the subject was actually the blank verse play, written sometime in the early 1980s, which I ended up inserting into the final version of Somnium, and the hero of the book, Kit Morley, actually refers to it as a work he’d written in his youth… Come 2001, I decided to combine a certain amount of magical practice centred on Selene with writing the novel that became Somnium. The two things were pretty much inseparable, but that’s often the way Alan and I do Moon And Serpent things … the magic and the art combine in a creative process and the ‘working’ ends up as a ‘work’, in this case Somnium.
In a rare in depth interview, Somnium author Steve Moore reveals almost all to Aug Stone over at the excellent The Quietus, along with an extract from one of the book’s tales with tales.
You can buy the special edition of Somnium, signed and numbered by Steve and Alan Moore, with a litho print of John Coulthart’s cover artwork, here.
