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Lord Horror
Savoy hardback, 192 pages, £10.95
Published January 1st, 1990
ISBN 0-86130-072-6
Review by David Clark (1990/1)

To give you an idea of what to expect:

Lord Horror is Lord Haw-Haw, the wartime quisling who broadcasts for the Nazis. Having survived the war, he comes to present day England on the trail of his old friend Hitler, ending up with a regular show on BBC Radio Manchester. The show is arranged for him by John Appleton, a character based on Greater Manchester Police Chief Constable (and censorious Christian Moralist) James Anderton.

Lord Horror is a vindictive satire on British racism, surreal and surprising, a mixture of scatological jokes, vicious violence and comic strip capers as Horror and his ‘creep boys’, the four feet tall separated Siamese twins Meng and Ecker (now given their own Savoy ‘moral ambiguity’ comic) set about their merry antics. Horror and his cohorts are time travellers and sliders, moving through the alternative apocalypses of various 20th centuries (with the joins left out) in the manner of Jerry Cornelius and his friends (see, for instance, Michael Moorcock’s The English Assassin or The Entopy Tango or, most clearly, his Bastable trilogy).

Buy this book and its spun-off comics (Lord Horror and Meng and Ecker) while you can, if you can: Greater Manchester Police have submitted it to the Director of Public Prosecutions, claiming it to be racist and obscene (the novel does in fact quote Anderton and these, I understand, are some or all of the offending passages). Raids on Savoy have occurred on and off since 1980 (long before Lord Horror), when they began on Anderton’s own orders. The most recent took place on September 26 last year, when copies of Lord Horror and the associated comics were taken from Savoy’s shop on Deansgate, Manchester. This could well be the first novel to reach the courts since 1967, when Hubert Selby, Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn was banned (the ban was lifted a year later, following an appeal led by John Mortimer).

Lord Horror is currently available in hardback only. The search for a paperback publisher continues.

Postscript:
Lord Horror was indeed banned, though the ban was lifted in July 1992 with the help of Article 19 and Geoffrey Robertson. See Savoy’s own site for copious details.

Lord Horror is now in print only in the Czech Republic – in Czech, published by Volvox Globator. The only English edition is so scarce a copy fetched £220 when auctioned by Index on Censorship.

A CD audiobook edition featuring readings from the novel by P.J. Proby was issued by Savoy in 1999. Again, see their site.