Iain Sinclair wrote about it for the London Review of Books when it was first published in 2003:
His book, the first to do justice to the transcendent weirdness of this boot of land that isn’t London, should be treasured. By living so long in the immediate past, by digging and listening and making the phone-calls, Seabrook has hallucinated an alternate English history.
Margate Sands as the pivotal moment for Modernism, nothing connected to nothing. The Mystery of Edwin Drood not so much solved as rewired: John Jasper as schizophrenic dreamer, the paradigm for Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, the divided man of future gothic. Artist/driller killer. Choirmaster/opium addict. A De Quincey stalker who rehearses his crimes in drugged sleep, thereby infecting Richard Dadd. So that the site of the murder is more significant that the identity of the murderer.
Dig through the rubbish of seaside junk pits and pinball arcades, Seabrook suggests, read the shilling-shockers, and the pattern will reveal itself. English fascism hidden in the pages of John Buchan. A schoolteacher living in retirement who remembers William Joyce as a benevolent father.
You can see David Seabrook in Sinclair's short film The Cardinal and The Corpse (from 11:40).
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