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.

Lee Morgan is a dual citizen of Britain and Australia and oscillates between the two based on fluctuating political embarrassments. A lifetime interest in the occult and poetry led to seven years at university studying wildly vocational topics such as literature. Fully assured of a likely career in the fast-food industry, Lee began to pursue publication of his first book. Lee continued to pursue publication of a book for well over a decade. A twenty-year involvement in traditional witchcraft and a lot of pushing from friends led to a first publication in nonfiction of A Deed Without a Name: Unearthing the Legacy of Traditional Witchcraft, which Lee describes as the book he would have liked to have found when first setting out upon the crooked path and is designed for the discerning beginner. A more ＂advanced＂ nonfiction title, Sounds of Infinity: Traditional Witchcraft and the Faerie Faith, was published in 2019.