There is a sequence in “From Hell,” the 1999 graphic novel written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Eddie Campbell, about the late-Victorian serial killer Jack the Ripper, in which the sulfurous antihero William Gull takes his hapless Cockney coachman on a tour of occult London’s landmarks. One extra-large panel (a “splash,” in comics parlance) depicts Cleopatra’s Needle, inscribed with hieroglyphic prayers to the Egyptian sun god Atum; another the steeple of St. Luke’s Church, on Old Street; a third the Monument, by legend built on the burial site of Britain’s mythic founder, Brutus of Troy. Dilating on each landmark (in speech bubbles), Gull alludes to the great London poet and artist William Blake, whose supposedly “mad prophecies and visions” amount, in Gull’s admiring view, to an uncommon receptiveness to the hidden truths of observable reality. Blake was a throwback to an earlier way of thinking. “’Tis but comparatively recently that seeing visions would call into doubt a person’s sanity,” Gull says. In Roman times, “divine encounters” were unremarkable. “Our brains were different then: The Gods seemed real.”

Like Blake, Moore—the author of such genre-defining graphic novels as “Watchmen,” published in 1987, and “V for Vendetta,” from 1989—is an artist committed to his own invented system of symbols and divinities. Gull, and Dr. Manhattan in “Watchmen,” inhabit a mystical realm beyond time; they depart from Blake in having feet of clay. Gull is a pompous blowhard. The superheroes in “Watchmen” are retired, disenchanted parodies of American might. Much of Moore’s appeal rests in bathos: his gods are fallen, at once numinous and mundane. According to the writer Iain Sinclair, a friend of Moore’s whom the graphic novelist consulted on the nineteenth-century London of “From Hell,” Moore works in the “visionary tradition of William Blake, whereby you make your own cosmology from glinting local particulars,” and, in so doing, he “embodies the nonconformist spirit of locality.” Blake, Sinclair reminded me, had seen angels on Peckham Rye. In Moore’s new novel, “Jerusalem,” a gang of four archangels plays billiards for human souls in a dingy snooker hall.

Despite Moore’s international fame—four of his novels have been made into major Hollywood movies—he remains, in his influences and intellectual sensibility, the inheritor of a distinctly English, dissenting tradition. He has spent his entire life in his glum East Midlands home town of Northampton. (He and his wife, the Californian comics artist and author Melinda Gebbie, share two houses in the town. His two daughters, from his first marriage, are now grown-up; the elder, Leah, is now a comic-book artist in her own right.) In 1993, on his fortieth birthday, he declared himself a ceremonial magician; the core of his belief, which he speaks of with striking cogency, is that art is indistinguishable from magic.

Moore’s peculiar strain of gutter mysticism is especially evident in “Jerusalem,” his second non-graphic novel and the product of more than a decade’s labor. Above all, it’s a hymn to Northampton, a commemoration of the lost people and places of his childhood. It is also nearly thirteen hundred pages long, syntactically and metaphorically unrestrained, and epic in scope: the narrative roams freely from the ninth century to the present, co-opting a range of literary styles, from Beckettian pastiche to Joycean stream of consciousness. The novel has the immersive imaginative power of fable; it also deepens Moore’s career-long investigation into the kind of collapsed rationality that borders on genius and might, very easily, be misdiagnosed as madness. Toward the end of the novel, the nineteenth-century “peasant poet” John Clare sits on the steps of All Saints’ Church, on George Row, alongside a motley crew: the seventeenth-century writer John Bunyan; Samuel Beckett; Johnny and Celia Vernall, an ordinary twentieth-century couple based on real-life relatives of Moore’s; and Kaph, a refugee worker who died in 2060. Moore leaves it open as to whether Clare—who for a period believed himself to be Lord Byron, and spent the final twenty-two years of his life in Northampton General Lunatic Asylum—is hallucinating, or if these anachronistic figures might be coeval in another dimension. Clare and Bunyan discuss their literary longevity. The Vernalls wonder where they might go for a pee.

Almost all of “Jerusalem” is set in Northampton, a town that Moore has fondly described as a “cultural black hole.” For Moore, the town’s provincialism is part of its appeal. As he has noted, Northampton has long been a center of political and religious heterodoxy. From the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, radical groups like the Lollards, the Levellers, and the Antinomians gravitated there in their search for sanctuary—for a new Jerusalem. These days, its reputation for post-industrial gloom only makes it all the more hospitable to dissent. It’s easier to be odd when the culture has its back turned.

“The reason I liked comics was that nobody else did, because it was completely unsupervised,” he said earlier this summer, at the Odditorium, an evening of countercultural discussion in Brighton. “I was given a chance to sneak up on culture by some sort of back door.” Moore is famously controlling with the illustrators of his comics work, insistent on his own system—as if wary, in Blake’s phrase, of being “enslav’d by another Mans.” After a dispute with DC Comics over the publishing rights to “Watchmen” and “V for Vendetta,” he preferred to disown both books. A legal wrangle over the movie version of “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” led him preëmptively to turn down vast sums in rights fees for further adaptations.

Now that revisionist interpretations of the superhero genre are the Hollywood norm (in large part thanks to Moore), he has abandoned the form. “I would rather do things that nobody wants,” he said, of his decision to spend the past decade on a metaphysical, postmodern novel. “It’s the most interesting thing to do, to find the areas of culture that are not being paid attention to.” Characteristically, with “Jerusalem,” he has refused any intervention from his publisher. “What I wanted was to do something that was so completely unmediated and undiluted. I thought, I don’t want anybody making helpful suggestions.”

On a dreary Wednesday morning, the sky low and bruised, Moore and I met to take a walking tour of the Boroughs, the traditionally working-class area of Northampton where he grew up. Moore met me off the London train on the concourse of Northampton station, which, after recent development, resembles an airport terminal. “I’m just looking for how we get out of here,” he said, scanning the expanse of plate glass and exposed steel.

With his long, graying hair and extravagant beard, Moore resembles Blake’s mythical creation Urizen, who, in “The Ancient of Days,” crouches outside space-time to measure the universe with a pair of celestial compasses. I had first met him a few weeks earlier, at the Odditorium, and had remarked on his Dalmatian-print winkle-picker shoes. (Moore likes to dress up; on the occasion of Britain voting to leave the E.U., he performed a rap about demagoguery in a “three-quarter-length white-satin frock coat,” with his face painted to resemble a mandrill, “the best-looking creature in the world.”) Today, apart from a knuckleful of sorcerer’s rings and a walking stick made to resemble a snake god, on the handle, he looked relatively ordinary, as we made our way past W. H. Smith, the newsagent shop, down the street.