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In 'Jerusalem,' Nothing You've Ever Lost Is Truly Gone 

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For some fans of comics, Alan Moore is basically a god. He's the media-shy and magnificently bearded writer of comics like "Watchmen," "V for Vendetta 2" and "From Hell." Recently, Moore said he's stepping back from comics to focus on other projects, like his epic 3 new novel called "Jerusalem." It's full of angels, devils, saints and sinners, visionaries, ghost children and wandering writers, all circling his hometown of Northampton, England. He rarely leaves Northampton, so NPR's Petra Mayer went there to meet him.

ALAN MOORE: This is holy ground for me.

PETRA MAYER, BYLINE 4: It doesn't look like holy ground. We're standing 5 on a neglected, grassy 6 strip by a busy road. Nothing's here now, except a solitary 7 house on the corner, but it wasn't always this way.

MOORE: This is it. That is the little alleyway that used to run beyond our terrace. This is where I was born.

MAYER: We're in the Boroughs 8, a half-mile square patch of Northampton by the railroad tracks. Weedy, vacant lots sit next to a boarded-up public housing and the occasional pub. But wind the clock back a hundred years, and this lonely place was packed with people and stories.

MOORE: Around about this spot, there would have been a pub called the Friendly Arms. Newton Pratt - he had a zebra that he, I think, purchased at Wicksteed Park. He would tie up the zebra outside the pub, bring it out a pint 9 of beer.

MAYER: And there'd be a drunk zebra standing in Scarletwell Street, around the corner from the house where Moore was born in 1953. That fantastical zebra shows up in the book, by the way. And here I thought he made it up.

MOORE: I had to make very little of this book up.

MAYER: "Jerusalem" is hard to describe. Apart from the physical and obvious, it's more than 1,200 pages long, and in hardback, you could use it to do bicep curls. It's part fantasy, part history, partly purely 10 bonkers, but every page shines with a love of this place as it once was.

MOORE: It's all built from the history of the neighborhood itself and the history of my family. And most of the history is genuine, although the stuff about the angels and demons 11 - I'm not so sure about that. You know, I think there's a good case to be made.

MAYER: In fact you could say that Northhampton, more than any of the hundreds of people that wander through the book, is really the main character. It only seems like a nondescript town in the British Midlands. To Alan Moore, it's at the center of everything, from the English Civil War to the birth of modern capitalism 12.

MOORE: I had a sense before I started writing "Jerusalem" that this was probably a more important place than people gave it credit for.

MAYER: In a little studio on Northampton's Abbington Square, we're sitting in creaky, wooden chairs under a rather occult-looking stained glass window. Moore is all in basic black, heavy silver rings on every finger - a wizard on his day off. He fires up a hand-rolled cigarette almost as big as the book and tells me about how Albert Einstein saw the universe as a frozen explosion, a giant ball of beginning and ending all happening at once forever.

MOORE: Every moment that has ever existed or will ever exist is somewhere suspended in that gigantic space-time football. And it is there forever, and it is not changing.

MAYER: Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey - I know, but stay with me. It's important because if everything that ever was is still all around us, then nothing you've ever lost is truly gone. The Boroughs was torn down in phases, beginning just after the First World War. Alan Moore's family was forced out in 1969, but in Moore's book, just like in Einstein's universe, everything is still there, even the drunken zebra in Scarlett Street.

MOORE: I find that reassuring 13.

MAYER: It is reassuring, which is sort of weird 14 if you're familiar with Alan Moore's other work. He's better known for supernatural horror, tentacles 15, murder, mayhem, dystopia. And while Jerusalem does have its fair share of horror and misery 16 and death, Moore says he wants the book to help people rethink death, to be less afraid of it.

MOORE: Whether it be their own death or the death of other people or the death of a culture or even the fact that they don't do those sweets that I used to like anymore. But, yes, that's all fine. Back down the road, they still make Spangles. Morecambe and Wise are still on television on Saturday night. Everything's fine, just as it was.

MAYER: So don't worry about death, Moore says. Live your life, and enjoy the remarkable 17 cosmos 18 we live in.

MOORE: This is the never-ending story. This is your narrative 19. This is the wonderful, sacred story of your life, and it's going to be there forever.

MAYER: "Jerusalem" is in part the sacred story of Alan Moore's own life. And at the end of the book, one character says that's what art's for. It rescues everything from time. Petra Mayer, NPR News.