Your new book, The Art of the Unknown, is the fourth instalment in the Art in the Margins series. Could you tell us a little about the series and how it came about? And tell us more about this new book, including who you think will enjoy it and what it covers? 
 
The Art in the Margins series is where I get to gather up the art that's burrowed into my bones and infiltrated my dreams and tangled round my heart, which is a strange thing to say about work that lives so far out at the edges, the occult, the shadowy, the unexplained. But that's exactly it. The outermost stuff turns out to be the most intimate for me to ponder. That gap, between how remote it looks and how near it feels, is more or less what these books are about. 
 
There are four of them now, each one wandering off into a different corner of the marvellous and the mysterious, and The Art of the Unknown is the newest. It's about artists reaching for the things none of us can quite explain: cosmic forces and hidden worlds, restless spirits, states of vision, the prickle of a place that feels haunted or somehow off. Nearly 200 works, from the fifteenth century right up to now. 
 
It's for the people who love a good answer but feel a small pang, a little ache, when the puzzle is slotted together, when the mystery finally gives up its secret and something quietly takes a piece of you with it. The very searching that had been giving your days their shape, some private engine that had been keeping you company. The looking was the thing you loved, it turns out, more than whatever you were looking for. 
 
The book covers a vast period of art; can you tell us which artists in the book, from past and present, are some of your favourites? 
 
From the older work in the book, a few I keep coming back to. Léon Spilliaert, whom I've loved for as long as I can remember, an insomniac wandering his empty seaside town at night and drawing it until it looks like the inside of three in the morning. Wenzel Hablik turns the cosmos into a living, crystalline, glittering thing; Pamela Colman Smith is best known now for the tarot deck half the world reads by, though I love her just as much for the pictures she made of what music looked like to her. Leonor Fini, all imperious sphinxes and sorceresses and cats. Niki de Saint Phalle built an entire garden of the tarot out of giant, mirrored, jewel-bright goddesses. Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita, all milky whites and fine ink outlines, his cats and dreaming women poised somewhere between Paris and Tokyo. And Vilhelm Hammershøi, grey near-empty rooms and a lone figure turned to the wall, everything held utterly still. 
 
And a whole crowd of contemporary artists! Daniel Martin Diaz and his dense diagrams of the soul, half devotional panel and half impossible machine. Nona Limmen, making ghostly photographs that feel dreamed rather than taken. Anna Mond, whose paintings are wickedly cheeky, ghoulishly precious little riots steeped in equal parts cracked darkness and pure silliness. Rachael Bridge, whose palettes are somehow electric technicolor and sunless and dim all at once, her subjects half-vanishing into a dark private wonderland. Rebecca Chaperon, whose surreal worlds I could vanish into for an afternoon, and often do, palatial icebergs and secret caves, crystals hovering free of gravity, twin figures mirroring each other across the canvas, a lone candle here and there burning like a small lit mind. Susan Jamison, spellbinding across paint and textile in her ritual, botanical, feminine imagery. Becky Munich, a longtime partner-in-crime of mine, who packs every drawing with monstrous, beguiling femme fatales and ethereal wraiths and a sly streak of creepy mischief in the details. And Luciana Lupe Vasconcelos, a Brazilian art witch who works in a kind of trance, channeling sphinxes and femme monsters and occult symbols out of the unconscious in ink and watercolor. I could go on embarrassingly long, which is rather the trouble with asking me this. 
 
I'll admit two of my great loves aren't even in this one, which is deeply, weirdly on brand for me. Remedios Varo turns up in nearly all my books, but she was in the early drafts of this one and got pulled somewhere along the way, so she only survives as a mention now. And Charles Burchfield never made it in at all, though I love him helplessly, the way he paints a field or a stand of trees until the whole landscape seems to buzz and breathe and live in a strange, surreal dream. 
 
You've been writing your blog unquietthings.com since 2009 and still post on there regularly. If people want to read more from you about art, what can they expect there? 
 
I have been blogging in some form or another since 2002, and this eventually became my Unquiet Things blog…it is the longest-running of all my obsessions, and the most unruly. It's where I write about the art that's unsettled or enchanted or rattled me, with real attention paid to who made it and why, but mostly how it makes me feel. Some weeks it's whatever weird rabbit hole I’ve tumbled into, a half-forgotten cult film, an odd old book, an obscure niche perfume, an alien off-world abyssal rave masquerading as a Paris Fashion Week runway show, the occasional Skeletor. You know, totally normal things, ha! And many, many interviews with artists and writers and creators that I admire!  It's never been a polished or scholarly place, just a running record of one curious person's enthusiasms, kept up in public for a very long time now. 
 
Aside from yours, obviously, do you have any other favourite blogs or books that you would recommend people to check out? 
 
Yes, quite a few. For reading online, the first place I'd send you is 70s Sci-Fi Art Tumblr and newsletter Adam Rowe's ongoing love letter to that gloriously strange golden age of science fiction illustration, all cosmic awe and lurid alien suns and impossibly graceful ships, plus the weirder corners curated spectacularly: skeletons in spacesuits, cities under glass domes, whole landscapes reflected in the curve of a single space helmet. Then John Coulthart's blog, feuilleton, a decades-deep wander through the surreal, the esoteric, and the psychedelic, where art and design and film and music all come together.  J. Simpson's Hauntology Now Substack, sonic at its core, roving across ambient and techno and drone and the ghostlier edges of electronic music, though it also wanders off into horror novels and ghost stories and folklore films and astrology, which is precisely the sort of wandering I am prone to myself. Moon Lists, which nudges you toward paying closer attention to your own life through gentle seasonal prompts. And The Marginalian, Maria Popova's long, generous roam through art and literature and meaning, which has been reshaping how I think for years and years. 
 
For books: Adam Rowe's Worlds Beyond Time gathers the best of that 70s sci-fi art into one gallery of a book, everything from the avant-garde and surreal to the trippy and the bizarre, and the writing has a warm, funny, chatty voice that feels like spending time with a friend. Naomi Sangreal's Little Hidden Doors is a dream journal that's really a whole dreamwork practice, Jungian doorways and prompts to write and collage and paint your way into your own sleeping mind. My copy is annotated half to death! Spiritus Mundi, edited by Elizabeth Sulis Kim, is an anthology of writing made through actual occult methods, the authors scrying, reading tarot, watching for synchronicities, and writing from what surfaced. Reading it set off its own little run of synchronicities for me, and Pam Grossman's "Invocation to Iris," a lyric essay on the goddess of rainbows, is alone worth the price of the book. And The Sphinx and the Milky Way collects Charles Burchfield's journals; his writing carries the same trembling, overfull wonder as his paintings. And the book of poetry I have read and reread and gifted more than any other is Sonya Vatomsky's gorgeous, gothy, witchy, weird, feast-as-fable-as meditation on grief, Salt Is For Curing. 
 
A few more I'd point you toward: Dinara Mirtalipova's Imagine a Forest, a folk-art how-to that's really an invitation to build your own enchanted little world, all pattern and color and whimsy, with the meaning behind each motif tucked in beside it. And Jessica Swift's Art for Self-Care, which treats making art as a way to listen to your own intuition and look after yourself, no skill required, the doing of it counting for far more than the result. As an art-writer who has never really been an art-arter, I have found these so inspirational in my beginner art-baby journey! 
 
And finally, what new projects do you have on the horizon that we can look forward to? 
 
There's another book in the works that I'm keeping mostly to myself for now, one that burrows deeper into some of the myriad subject matter in The Art of the Occult. I'm not going to jinx it by calling it a series, but oh, how I'd love for it to become one. 
 
Beyond that, I keep a great many small fires burning. My blog, Unquiet Things. My Rue Morgue magazine column, The Ghoul Next Door, which roams around macabre art and the stranger, darker corners of culture and how all of my obsessions and fascinations all lead, somehow, back to horror. And finally Midnight Stinks, my perfume Patreon, where I let the writing run wildest. Scent is the most ungovernable thing to put into language, and to talk about it, you must reach for everything at once: texture and memory and color and mood and the strange little narrative a fragrance unspools on the skin, all of it piled up until a smell becomes a place you can walk into. It's the most inventive writing I do, and the most fun. It's all the same tangle of obsessions, really, just wandering off in every direction at once. I'd be utterly lost without any of it.