Dear Reader –
Hola! Now comes your chance to be a go-getting early adopter and pre-order Luda, my first published novel without pictures!
God bless you one and all!
Right up front here are the links to the preorder on the Random House website, plus they have devised a bonus extra tasty ingredient where you can download wallpaper and even more intrusive chatter from moi!
LUDA is available to preorder from Random House or other retailers via this link, other editions including the ebook and audiobook are also here.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/667986/luda-by-grant-morrison/
If you have already preordered the book, or should you order anytime between now and midnight on the 5th September you’ll be eligible for bonus content here including a letter and exclusive wallpapers:
See you there!
So here I am on my wingéd throne where sweet Nikki Grahame once raged.
And we’re on Substack, so it seemed appropriate to create this exclusive delve into Luda’s glittering genesis in the style of my Substack annotations posts…
The roots of Luda stretch back to what may have been the late ‘80s/early ‘90s and a powerful dream which involved finding a secret subterranean police station, dominated by an enormous, numinous wall map. This spectacular Ordnance Survey extravagance displayed in scaled down high fidelity the streets and rivers and parkland of a much grander, more expanded, geographically unfolded and marvelous version of my hometown Glasgow. It depicted, in fact the entirety of an alternative Glasgow I’ve been visiting in dreams my whole life and bore at its base a simple plaque which read ‘MYSTERY CITY’.
I’ve tried over the years to assemble maps of my concept city as seen for the only time in that one dream in its full splendour – familiar landmarks and districts, absent from the real world, reappear reliably and always in the same geographical location – but the task yielded only fragments, collages, sketches of shopping mall cathedrals and Art Deco cinemas on a high plateau in the Gorbals, a desert west of Govan with the haunting ruins of half-finished motorway flyovers, a warren of mysterious bookstores, repair shops, windows with moving model railways and RV helicopter kits where utilitarian Buchanan Street bus station stands in the territory of the Real.
I’m aware that my personal interior city and environs is, in part, comprised of early memories; all Burroughsian cut-up infant perceptions of iron bridges, vast train terminals and intriguing bookstores long since demolished, mixed with illustrations or TV scenes, and completely fantastical original creations, whole constituencies propagated from a single architectural seed. Raised on immaterial foundations, made secure with bricks and tiles of pure intangible thought, these absent alleyways and fountains have managed to outlive their counterparts in the perishable, solid world, finding new purpose, continued progress and what, for a phantom psychetropolis conjured up by sparking neurons, seems an enviable persistence.
I tried to write a novel or make a comic entitled MYSTERY CITY but while the central image seemed potent, the story possibilities threatened to veer towards Neil Gaiman contemporary fantasy or Peter Ackroyd/Iain Sinclair literary flaneur territory and I had no desire to face the apex lions in either arena!
Elements of this idea, one that’s clearly been nagging at the back of my mind for decades, show up also in the depiction of the bleeding map of Glasgow on the dissecting table in the psycho-geographical comic Bible John: A Forensic Meditation by me and Danny Vallely.
Twenty years ago, I scribbled the name Luda as a potential title for a potential psycho-sci-fi sex novel. It sounded, as the current book’s narrator points out, like some lost Delacorta thriller and in its syllables there’s a borrowed hint of the obsessional quality of Nabokov’s Lolita. Luda, player of games, manipulator – over the years I’d append notes; disguise, illusion, Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth, the two-hander drama, master and pupil, All About Eve, mirrors and doubles…
One more unpursued thread that led to Luda was a superhero-ish riff on Frankenstein crossed with A Clockwork Orange and the comic book ‘origin story’ narrative, where I had the lead character’s former personality wiped out and replaced step by step by a more amenable one as they’re accelerated through Piaget’s developmental sequence on the way – I’d been reading up on the horrific ‘brainwashing’ procedures devised by Scottish mind control pioneer Ewen Cameron and thought I had to do something to get rid of the creepy aftertaste!
None of these fragmentary whimsical musings came with sufficient gravity to cause them to clump together into anything capable of sustaining life, so the proto-Luda went nowhere, ‘filed’ (a euphemism for ‘added to a compost heap the cats use as combined playground/ toilet facilities’) with the rest of the half-baked ideas, and left there to alchemize in the seething humid dark of the subconscious.
Years passed, each in its turn eager to escape the burden of being the anxious future, and I toyed briefly with the idea of a series of comics telling short complete stories about life in Mystery City, now renamed ‘Gasglow’.
The series was meticulously, one might reasonably say compulsively, constructed around the Pythagorean Golden Section, phi, ones and zeroes and binary code (much of that thinking still informs the structure and scaffolding of Luda but I soon dropped the manic idea of doing 10 chapters of exactly 5, 000 words each when the book outgrew its origins as a potential spoken word novella).
One of these proposed 48-page stories was Big Crazy, a ‘mythic documentary’ re-telling of some of my dad’s wartime experiences, while another was to be called Golden Dames – based around a purely oneiric Gasglow theatre district occupying the Anderston area in the real-world, and set in the spellbinding, vulgar, gender and culture blurring world of pantomime. Golden Dames, named after the pentagram-shaped board game, retold the cautionary story of the aging wizard Merlin and his teenage protégé, the witch Nimue, (Vivienne in some accounts), with two drag queens taking the central roles as Mistress and Pupil.
By this time, as you’ll see when you read it, most of the primary elements that blossomed into Luda were in place, including the central idea of the Glamour, which appeared here as a play on that word’s double meaning of Magic and Allure.
When the backdrop of a performance of Aladdin became instead the post-modern Phantom of the Pantomime, Golden Dames became Luda, flowering into first a novella then a full-length novel at the urging of my urgent agent Peter McGuigan, it soon became clear to me that writing a novel requires the elevation of the author’s scope and ambition, a total commitment and the transfusion of life’s blood into ink and fiction. For this reason, there are many more direct, unfiltered and clearly visible imprints of the author’s personal experiences, good and bad, in this made-up tale than in most of the work I’ve done previously.
Luci LaBang is not me; her story, her relationships, her opinions are not mine, but as part of the act of magic, the demonstration of Glamour that brought her into being, I gave Luci full authority to ransack my biography, to sweep through the racks of my experiential boutique and swipe what she might need to perhaps pass a Turing Test, or even outwit the Ultimate Adversary…
Luci’s Gasglow, my Glasgow, is raw and squalid, intoxicated, sentimental, rude and ruthless; a frenzied breeding ground where genres mate and give birth to monstrous plots! Magician that she is, Luci brings the makeover, the disco lights and bubble guns, the rose coloured glasses of the Glamour, the wit and the shade, reminding us that life’s dull round can be a party for the ages and the everyday is only ever a lipstick away from the extraordinary.
But where’s there’s a glitterball, shadows run riot, as Luci Labang soon finds out when her shallow life is turned inside out by the irresistible, terrifying enigma that is Luda…
Thanks again for taking the plunge into Luci’s peacock reality of pimped up psychedelic prose, her lime-lit world of showbiz and illusion, death and desire, sex, drugs and drag!
Naturally I hope you enjoy reading Luda but even if you don’t, I’m happy to report that the book can be marinated in a lime and chili sauce, lightly fried in tempura batter and enjoyed with a bucket of fine wine or non-alcoholic beverage of your choice, so it’s win-win all the way!
Best
Grant
If you’re good, MORE!!!
But what is good, Cap-tain?…
19/8 LUDA Exclusive video read and Preorder links