What has now “become” my first book SOHO (1996-99) was never meant to be a book at all as that material seemed too inchoate

What has now “become” my first book, SOHO (1996-99), was never meant to be a book at all, as that material seemed too inchoate. AUTISMUS (1999-2002) was always meant to be my first book. Only as I was about to publish AUTISMUS, I thought let me just check the words I was writing immediately before, and there was such good stuff in it, I thought I have to try to pull this together. SOHO (1996-99) kind of naturally had an atmosphere of 1896-99 about it (in my head anyway), helped by my love of Ernest Dowson, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack the Ripper (not love in his case exactly), and I do think MOLOCH (2020-) will have the spirit of the 1920s about it. This could be a fantastic era dawning now—as Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings reshape the political landscape in a radical way, at the same time as I hope for a similar paradigm shift in my own life; my return to Moloch the first part of it. I love the defiance of it (SOHO 1996-99), the defiant arrogance of it, the declaration of war of it, the refusal to take a single step backwards of it—on the contrary, the deliberate marching right into the heart of the enemy of it. Before the rest of my books became more about my unrequited lovesickness for one unobtainable woman after another, AUTISMUS, LOTTA, THE COLD ICY AIR OF THE MOUNTAINS, CASANOVA LOST WANDERINGS and THE STRIPPER. MOLOCH will be a return to the cold defiant arrogance of SOHO.