Unlocking the overlooked

Strange Attractor Journal Five ed. Mark Pilkington & Jamie Sutcliffe Strange Attractor Press 2023 Pb, 288pp, £20, ISBN 9781907222528 This volume five of a very occasional journal (there has been a pause of a dozen years) combines well-researched articles, often excellently illustrated, pierced between very dark neo-gothic full-page apposite woodcuts. This collection of often magical and always esoteric offerings offers retrospective vignettes of Victorian to mid-20th century people, happenings and celluloid in a mishmash of folk, popular and high culture and scholarship (some perhaps drifting into obscurantism). Many articles, always questioning, are straightforward, illuminating persona, places and folk-related animalia. Twentieth-century cinema, and its film stars, real and nascent, flickers in the background and in one long offering in the foreground; sex, religion, political power and the occult are central. Old,…