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Series Description:
One eye grey is the first of a planned series of Penny Dreadfuls for the 21st Century that retell London folklore and ghost stories in a modern setting.
The series title refers to the cockney legend of the Queen Rat, a giant rodent able to transform herself into a beautiful woman in order to seduce handsome dockside workers. According to the myth if the man satisfies ratty then he will be blessed with riches and many children, the first of whom will be a girl born with one grey eye and the other blue.
Book Description:
Transpontine Drift is the first section and aside from ratty you'll find shape shifters in Shepherds Bush, pagan estate agents, a dragon breeding programme in Rotherhithe alongside other strange tales and facts from the metropolis. These stories are introduced by Carl Gee and woven together by a group of modern Londoners who are meeting up after a funeral and forced to confront elements of the past that refuse to lie still.
Part two (A Goose in Southwark) follows on in June 2007 and the final segment (Out of Orbital) wraps up all the tales in October 2007.
From the Publisher
London is a mortropolis, full of echoes from the past that issue from within and beneath its buildings - two thousand and more years of history are written into its architecture. The view from Lambeth Bridge opens up a whole world of supernatural possibilities, and many tales are told of the Thames below and the embankments alongside it. Spring-Heeled Jack favoured Lambeth with his attentions, and Blake wrote London, his paean to misery and human suffering, while living in Hercules Road. All around me were places where events had occurred that would shape the whole country. Canute tried to reverse the tide here, uprisings were overturned, heretics tortured and burned in Lambeth Palace, kings driven from their thrones, revolutions plotted and thwarted. But, like Canute, I had learned there were some things you couldn't turn back. There were some bridges that you had to cross, then burn.
Carl, quoted above, and his friends are a group of modern Londoners at the heart of this collection of short stories based on traditional folk tales. As well as linking the stories together they form part of a longer and darker narrative that weaves its way through the three parts of this series. The illustrated magazine format as well as the manner in which the stories are told aim to evoke a London out of time, neither present nor past where all manner of uncanny events become possible.
