The Debut Novel from Jake Fior
‘Through a Looking Glass Darkly’. Limited Edition and Main Edition available now.

Here we encounter Alice not as a Victorian schoolgirl but a confident yet conflicted teenager immersed in a landscape of impending danger and bewildering beauty. The book’s illustrations are not exact reproductions of Tenniel’s work but a set  of partially redrawn and fantastically coloured images. The book contains unpublished and previously unseen work by Tenniel, the original illustrator of Alice and  one of the greatest illustrators of all time.

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Crucially, the titular Looking Glass of Fior’s  novel is not that of a domestic living room mirror atop a mantelpiece, but a sorcerous magic mirror salvaged from a junk shop.  

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This reimagining is complemented through the use of references to actual historical events including W.B.Yeats’ membership of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and the battle to save it from the malign influence of a young Aleister Crowley.

Fior presents the occulture of the late 19th Century as a blend of mysticism, conspiracy and artistic experimentation, seamlessly blending this secondary story into Carroll's earlier work.

The final chapter documents the extraordinary history of this book. The very process of its creation seems to have eerily invoked the discovery of major lost historical objects and a relationship between Carroll's original text and the arcane teachings of Western Mysticism.

After all, mirrors reflect and also distort. They offer a glimpse of the self but also open a portal into the world of the double, the doppelganger and the daimon.

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