• Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2011 October #1
  "What enormous hosts of dead belong to one old great city!" Dickens marveled in 1861. Ackroyd here invades the ghostly realm under Britain's greatest old city. Visits to crypts, catacombs, and cemeteries draw the reader deep into the hidden world where prehistoric mastodons, Roman soldiers, medieval monks, and Victorian burghers mingle in sepulchral gloom. But that gloom also pulses with the energy of life: the crowded underground railroads still running on routes carved out by intrepid nineteenth-century tunnelers, the black filth flowing through a thousand miles of sewer lines still performing the inglorious function of medieval cesspools, and the intricate modern matrix of conduits and pipes carrying electricity, natural gas, and drinking water. Nonhuman life also scurries through the shadows: cockroaches, rats, and even mysterious white crabs. But Ackroyd fuses dead and living, human and animal, technological and natural in the final chapter, where underground geography becomes imaginative metaphor in the Eloi-Morlock fantasy of Wells' Time Machine. As a sequel to London: The Biography, this is an enthralling step down! Copyright 2011 Booklist Reviews.

PETER ACKROYD is the author of London: The Biography, Shakespeare: The Biography, Thames: The Biography, and Venice: Pure City; acclaimed biographies of T. S. Eliot, Dickens, Blake, and Sir Thomas More; and several successful novels. He has won the Whitbread Book Award for Biography, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Somerset Maugham Award, among others.