He finds a few lines about Margate Sands in The Waste Land, describes how Eliot spent a few weeks in the town in 1921 while convalescing after a nervous breakdown, and identifies the chipped Victorian pedestrian shelter, still standing on the front, where the poet wrote, watching the grey waves and the shell-shocked veterans of the world war just gone.Īt other times the book makes riskier connections. Sometimes Seabrook's approach is that of relatively conventional biography and literary criticism. Seabrook takes four famously unsettling works of literature - The Waste Land by TS Eliot, The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Dickens, Robin Maugham's The Servant and John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps - and attempts to expose their origins in real Kentish places and past events.

His contemporary descriptions are spare and vivid - a seafront bench is painted 'ketchup red' - but they are mainly context for a deeper project. In Margate he sees 'hunched sedated souls lingering in cafes' elsewhere he notes the tense silence in pubs full of unemployed dockworkers. However, his book is only fleetingly interested in modern Kent, that bruised thumb of land with its asylum-seekers and troubled resorts. Seabrook lives in the county from the autobiographical glimpses he provides, he seems to have done so all his life. What he finds fills the pages much better than you might imagine.

Now Seabrook has crept round the blustery coast of Kent from Rochester to Broadstairs via Margate with his notebook. WG Sebald has written about Suffolk, Philip Hoare has written about Southampton, Sinclair himself is finishing a book about the M25. Yet recently, as London has become an over-familiar subject for non-fiction explorations thanks to the success of Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, so this hybrid genre - part travelogue, part history, part gothic speculation - has turned its attentions outward from the capital. Its car parks, its roundabouts, its high streets lined with identical chain stores - any visiting writer with romantic ideas about probing this landscape would surely not persist for too many drizzly afternoons. Modern small-town England, and especially its suburban southeast, is a place that seems firmly resistant to quests for dark secrets. He returns with a remote control which he aims at the video recorder. As if infected by my excitement Gordon jumps up and walks past me, looking for something. 'I sit up and shift forward,' he writes as Meadows begins a particularly tantalising digression.

Review all the devils are here