All the Devils Are Here

At first I wasn't sure what to make of this book. It's not travel writing. It's not a biography. It's not really a “true crime” exposé. It's something far stranger and far more haunting. It draws you in, a labyrinthine patchwork of interconnected strangeness.

Seabrook was an outsider whose writing, all done longhand and seldom finding a published outlet, detailed the faded, declining towns of the Kent coast. Sadly most of his writing is lost so it makes All The Devils Are Here even more of a joy to read.

Dark, desperate and full of the peculiar repression that was mid-20th Century England. And Seabrook is superb in weaving an intricate web of linked stories, from insane Victorian painters to Moseley's fascists, to hack novelists, to Carry On stars, to a possible serial killer ex-boxer, it's an endless parade of a vanished, drab, tawdry England. The kind you see in old fifties movies, or seventies TV series. An undercurrent of repressed homosexuality pervades to writing, a hangover from when it was illegal and clandestine.

It's an alternative history of England, a peek behind the curtain, a tour of closed down nightclubs and piers. The end of the road. Seabrook died in 2009. This and one other book, Jack of Jumps, are virtually all we have of his writing. A great book. One to be reread and picked over.