I sometimes think I only began this column so that one day I would be able to write about All the Devils Are Here by David Seabrook. All these months I’ve waited, deferring the pleasure; I’m doing it now because I’ve just talked about it on an edition of Backlisted, a brilliant books podcast to which you really should listen, at the invitation of its equally obsessed co-host, Andy Miller.
How to describe this uncommonly strange book? Published in 2002, it’s about Kent. I guess you’d call it psychogeography (emphasis on the word “psycho”), though this doesn’t begin to capture its intense interest, its uncanny spookiness, the way it ensnares you, turning your stomach, messing with your head. As a reader, you’re both afraid for and of its author, loitering at the book’s edges, spinning his increasingly deranged yarns without ever fully explaining himself. At its end, he does something that comes as a shock, a thing I still wonder about. Unfortunately, this mystery – and countless others – will never now be solved. Even had the notoriously difficult Seabrook been willing to talk, he died in 2009 at the age of 48, having completed only one further book.
We begin in Margate, where TS Eliot, recovering from a breakdown, worked on The Waste Land in a shelter overlooking the sands. The action then moves to Rochester and Chatham, involving itself with the parricide committed by the artist Richard Dadd and its connection, or not, to The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Proceeding to Broadstairs, Seabrook trades in sinister information about Lord Curzon, John Buchan and William Joyce, AKA Lord Haw-Haw. Finally, he pitches up in Deal, where the actor Charles Hawtrey drank himself to death, and where he hears the creepy story that inspired Robin Maugham’s novel The Servant (later a movie by Joseph Losey). A fugitive sort of book, twitchy and mournful, All The Devils Are Here demands to be reread, picked over, endlessly discussed (for which reason, huge thanks to the like-minded weirdos at Backlisted) – and yet to know it is somehow not to know anything at all.
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