The Rag & Bone Man

“We didn’t get to choose the stories we inherit.”

The rag and bone man comes meandering along your street in the dawn hours. He’s looking for old things that still have a bit of fat left in them, including off-cuts of outsiders’ dreams. If you decide to stop and talk to him, he will tell you the old tales of how to tease out the teeming world of spirits that bulges behind our reality. The Rag & Bone Man’s uncanny narrative, bookended by historical context and a grimoire inspired by the novel, bridges the gap between old ideas and new paradigms with a watchful eye on historical biases.

In this luminous novel, Lee Morgan covers sensationalism and fraud in nineteenth-century spiritualism and the ways in which we manipulated folklore and magic to cover and recontextualize our wrongdoings. Some of The Rag & Bone Man’s extra content focuses on the importance of sensory pleasure and alignment with the fetch, while crossing ectoplasmic lines to help you conduct a séance. The rag and bone man is a fixture in the novel’s real-life setting and is included in a performance art installation you can experience through a QR code in the book. Enter the rag and bone man's world if you dare—but be warned, the stories he's picked up will break your heart.