Unquiet
Things

Last summer I wrote a blog post musing on the green slime that got unceremoniously dumped on your head if you uttered the words “I don’t know.” (80s babies remember You Can’t Do That On Television, right?)

If at the time you read it and thought, this feels like it’s going somewhere … you were right. That was a plant. A deliberate, sneaky little entree designed to get you thinking about uncertainty and not-knowing, so that when I finally announced this, you might feel the satisfaction of having seen it coming.

So. Here it is.

The Art of the Unknown: A Visual Treasury of the Esoteric, Uncanny, and Unexplained is my fourth book, following The Art of the Occult, The Art of Darkness, and The Art of Fantasy, and it publishes September 1st from Frances Lincoln/Quarto.

This book has been a long time coming, and it grew from a handful of frustrations that had been rattling around in my head for years. People I know, generally smart and interesting people, making shit up rather than simply saying “I don’t know, but I’d love to find out.” Decades of images circulating on Tumblr and Pinterest and a thousand fashion blogs captioned “artist unknown,” and nobody bothering to wonder who or taking a few seconds to search around. The creeping cultural sense that not knowing something is either A. just the way it goes because it’s too hard to find an answer or B. a failure best not admitted, rather than a starting point to find potentiall something really cool.

And then there was the Richard Bober mystery. Some of you were there for it! In 2023 I wrote a blog post about a A Wrinkle in Time paperback cover I had been obsessed with for years, lurid, hypersaturated, genuinely nightmare-inducing, and could not for the life of me find an artist credit for. That post took on a life of its own: Reddit ran wild with it, WBUR’s Endless Thread podcast picked it up, the New York Times covered it, and eventually the mystery was solved. The artist was Richard Bober. I wanted that image for The Art of Fantasy but couldn’t use it because I didn’t know who made it until after the book was published

Well, guess what friends? It’s in this book!!!

Mystery, curiosity, the refusal to shrug and move on, and the extraordinary things that happen when you sit with and marinate in the not-knowing long enough to let it become something. That’s what this book is about.

Twelve chapters. Four parts. Forces Beyond, Realms Between, Remnants, Relics and Revelations, and The Human Mystery: cosmic forces and hidden watchers, parallel worlds and liminal spaces, restless souls and forgotten knowledge, visionary states and sacred cycles. Everything that lives at the edges of what we can explain, and the artists who went looking for it anyway.

Inside its pages: Wenzel Hablik painting the cosmos like a living, crystalline, pulsing thing. Agnes Pelton alone in her converted windmill, layering gossamer veils of translucent color until her surfaces pulse with starlight. Jan Konůpek building cosmic architecture that follows dream logic rather than physics. Ionel Talpazan, Romanian refugee and self-appointed ambassador between worlds, devotedly documenting extraterrestrial craft in feverish techno-spiritual blueprints that are part technical manual, part cosmic philosophy. Léon Spilliaert on his nocturnal wanderings through a desolate seaside town, drawing staircases that spiral into the abyss until your inner ear and your intrusive thoughts reach perfect, terrible agreement.

Louise Bourgeois transforming the human torso into a living panopticon, a constellation of watching eyes. Pamela Colman Smith painting what music looked like to her, unlocking what she called “a beautiful country” that existed somewhere between her ear and her eye. Penny Slinger, feminist Surrealist, starring in her own ghost story as both haunter and haunted. Frida Kahlo splitting herself into two competing identities on a lonely bench against churning skies, blood spilling onto pristine fabric, both faces maintaining identical, unnerving composure. Which version of ourselves do we nurture, and which do we allow to bleed away?

And many, many more artists and creators who have ventured into the realms of the impossible and ineffable and returned with field notes from the other side of whatever it is we think we know.

The front cover is Linda Westin’s staggeringly sublime work. Infrared photography revealing colors that exist beyond human sight. A shadowy Swedish forest where the branches create a perfect oculus. A lush, kaleidoscopic vortex of a thing that feels less like a photograph of a forest and more like what a forest dreams about itself.

The back cover is Nona Limmen, whose photographs arrive like transmissions from memory or dream, impossible to recount and equally impossible to forget. That figure on the staircase, enshrouded in diaphanous white, five candles held aloft in the dark. It feels less like art and more like evidence. (If you haven’t read my recent  profile of her work, that’s your next stop!)

Both artists appear inside the book alongside hundreds of others spanning centuries and cultures, and I’ll be introducing them properly over the coming weeks and months. They trusted me with their work, and I am so deeply grateful.

…Now, can we talk about pre-orders for a moment?

I know it can feel like a small gesture, clicking a button months before a book arrives, but I want to be honest with you about what it actually does, because it matters more than most people realize. Pre-orders are counted in a book’s first-week sales figures, and that first week is disproportionately important. It’s the number that tells booksellers how many copies to stock, that signals to publishers whether a book has momentum, that influences everything from front-of-store placement to whether an author gets offered another contract. The algorithm that determines visibility on retail sites weights early sales heavily. A strong pre-order showing can mean the difference between a book that gets hand-sold by booksellers who believe in it and one that  disappears.

Publishers don’t promote books the way most people imagine. The work of actually getting this book in front of readers is on me. That’s on most authors, at every level. If this book, or any of my books, has ever meant something to you, pre-ordering is the single most effective thing you can do to help it find the readers it’s looking for. More than sharing, more than reviewing, more than telling a friend, though please also do all of those things.

The pre-order link is here (and peppered liberally throughout this post, as I am sure you have noticed). Thank you, genuinely, for being here for all of it.

I went down so many deliriously art-drenched, visually stupefying, aesthetically overwhelming rabbit holes while researching this book, and like any good rabbit hole, The Art of the Unknown will not offer certainty or even clarity. That’s not what you go down one for. (At least that’s not why I go down rabbit holes! I go to get lost!)

Anyway, what it will offer you instead is wonder — and wonder, I’ve come to believe, is the better deal.