Search Worlds Without End

A surreal and scatological mixture of grand guignol and alternative history, it was the first of a series of novels and comic books set in a world in which Hitler had been victorious; the title character was an anti-Semitic psychopath based on the British traitor William Joyce ("Lord Haw-Haw").

In August 1991 Lord Horror was judged obscene by a Manchester magistrate, with orders that all copies be destroyed. It was the last time that a novel had banned in Britain under the United Kingdom's Obscene Publications Act.

"Lord Horror is one of the most authoritative indictments of the Holocaust and our moral responsibility for it... Britton and Butterworth are clearly working in the tradition of Hogarth, Swift, Dickens and others who were determined to examine the unpalatable realities of our lives... They wish to shock us out of any self-congratulation we might be feeling and force us to examine our own attitudes and those we accept in our society... Lord Horror confronts hypocrisy, violence, racialism, sexism, prejudice in all its hideous modern forms--ill-formed fears of homosexuals, people of colour and the jobless classes. Everything Lord Horror attacks is representative of that evil which the English pride themselves on defeating... By forcing us to confront the obscenities in our own society we are made to consider our own attitudes, perhaps even our own complicity."
MICHAEL MOORCOCK, Court Testimonial

"The true meaning of obscenity is that a book or comic is obscene if and only if it depraves or corrupts a significant proportion of likely readers. Lord Horror is not obscene under that definition... We give this book no accolade, we give it no approval."
JUDGE GERARD HUMPHRIES, QC
(Appeal Judge, ruling Lord Horror not obscene)

See also: The Horror Of It All: Savoy, David Britton and Lord Horror by author David Mitchell, Horror Panegyric by Supervert, and and The Unreprinted: LORD HORROR by Ben Arzate.

The great horror of modern history absorbed into the framework of surrealism, literary fantasy and the darkest children's fiction. Lautreamont and Sade meet Roald Dahl. The main protagonists are everyone's favorite comic heroes - Meng and Ecker - mutant twins, rescued from the death camps for 'research' purposes by the infamous Dr. Mengele. Unsurprisingly, this book has already appeared in court in Britain....

Allegedly an 'autobiographical' work, the book is set in a very bizarre alternate universe in England before and after the Second World War. Events are rendered in Symbolist fashion and explore the British Fascism of Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts and war-time radio broadcaster Lord Haw-Haw. Other dramatis personae include pop icon Jack Good, 1950s parliamentarian Lord Boothby, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, poetess Sylvia Plath and the biggest English movie star of the 1930s, Jessie Matthews. Includes illustrations by the author.