‘A singular literary achievement.’
‘A brilliant resurrectionist raid on the past as it should have unfolded. Mark Blacklock breathes new life into the tropes of detective fiction, occult mathematics and forensic science. He makes new mysteries out of re-forgotten enigmas.’
Iain Sinclair
‘Elsewhere Blacklock’s carpentry can be exquisite: marquetry might be a better description of a four-page ghost story called ‘The Four Brothers’, supposedly by Lafcadio Hearn, inlaid in the narrative. I can’t find a story of Hearn’s by that name and it is presumably a pastiche, but it’s hard to say which possibility is more satisfying: that a perfectly snug niche has been found for an existing text or that a fable has been fabricated to dovetail with Hinton’s preoccupations.’
Adam Mars Jones, London Review of Books
‘A dazzling display of extraordinary ideas and strange historical facts brought together in a technique that disrupts ordinary notions of time, space, and causality. The ruling metaphor is the search for the unknown, the exotic, and the hidden: Europeans in Meiji Japan, prospecting for minerals in the Americas, the truth about a father’s scandalous past, etc. The many threads of narrative from different times and places are woven together in such a way that the reader is impelled by the same curiosity that drives the principal characters. It is an extraordinary achievement.’
Charles Palliser
‘Somewhere between detective novel, philosophical head-scratcher and historical page-turner, Hinton is a chimerical treat.’
Danielle Lawler, Tatler
‘Hinton is a refreshing, unusual and enriching tale of ‘sadness and scandal’ that, in its capacity for imaginative compassion, manages to find something ennobling in both.’
‘An ingenious variant on the traditional buried secret narrative.’
‘A superb and challenging read – this is one of the most original and dazzling novels I have read in a long time. Beautifully written. I learned a lot from this book and it really made me think – about history and literature and the nature of truth. Fantastic.’
My first novel, I’m Jack, was published by Granta in June 2015. It tells the story of John Samuel Humble, the man who sent three hoax letters and a tape to police investigating the murders committed by Peter Sutcliffe in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
- Review by Catherine Taylor for The Guardian
- Review by Austin Collings for The Financial Times [log-in required]
- Review by Ben Myers for The New Statesman
- Interview with Dave Whelan for Vice
- Interview with Thom Cuell for The Workshy Fop
I’ve been exceedingly fortunate that my quite brilliant colleague, the Philip Leverhulme Medal-winning researcher Professor Martin Eve, has essayed a reading of the informational themes of I’m Jack.
Martin’s essay, ‘Reading Redaction: Symptomatic Metadata, Erasure Poetry, and Mark Blacklock’s I’m Jack,’ can be read here.
Recipes for Longpig
I have been writing a series of short fictions in a recipe form. These use the familiar textual template of the recipe to explore the grotesque, satirical and absurd. Many take figures or themes from contemporary culture and events and devise a way of cooking them. They are informed by both the Futurist Cookbook and J.G. Ballard’s surgical fictions in terms of thinking about what this formal mechanism can achieve. Some of these have been published and are available in printed form.
Neither Am I
Mark Blacklock 