London-based writer Charlie Fox, author of the hallucinatory and darkly comedic grimoire of modern monstrosity This Young Monster, took to his home city's iconic Nunhead cemetery with filmmaker Joseph Delaney in tow, for this Halloween-inspired episode of our returning literary series, Rambling.

“Fox explores the lives of outsider artists who have found beauty within the dark and the disturbing”

Fox's book relocates monstrosity beyond the cul-de-sac of primal fear, instead placing it within the minds, and hands, of outsider artists who have found beauty within the dark and the disturbing. Celebrating the likes of Stranger Things, David Lynch, and Leigh Bowery, Fox paints portraits that veer between the fictional and the factual, digging into the creative minds of artistic vagrants who "rebel against a reality that's too cruel or boring for them to inhabit." 

Nunhead cemetery, originally consecrated in 1840, is the resting place of many of London's Victorian notables, and features a host of elaborate tombs and mausoleums that best represent the 19th century's grandiloquent approach to death—where Gothic arches and monumental slabs of stone spread out across the lichen-smeared grounds.

A reality too cruel—an excerpt from Charlie Fox's This Young Monster

'What i wanted to celebrate is that my monsters, like some radical opposition force, are embodiments of everything such toxic ideologies wish to exclude: they embody otherness and make into art, ripping any conventional idea of beauty to shreds and replacing it with something weird and troubling of their own inventions—that’s heroic. And, yup, no little amount of ‘zoning out’ or trying to invent some other private world where the imagination can go wild is also crucial to their art. That’s how they rebel against a reality that’s too cruel or boring for them to inhabit. I mean, I really think of them as an antidote to all this ghastliness and bullshit, even if sometimes i feel guilty for wanting to be left in peace inside my imagination and not reckoning enough with all the horror going on outside. what’s it like inside a monster’s head? that’s the other question i kept on asking myself.'