Just send Mr King a dollar a chapter, and it's yours."Buck an episode," he says on his website. "When Installment One appears, send me the payment - we'll give you all the how-tos then. My friends, we have a chance to become Big Publishing's worst nightmare." That nightmare is direct publishing. Just as music and film companies fear the online systems such as Napster which circumvent their sales and copyright systems, so publishers worry that books may now move beyond their control.The book is "sort of funny and at the same time pretty gruesome," says King A "vampire vine" takes over a paperback publishing company. And grants financial success - but in exchange for human sacrifice.

No prizes for guessing Mr King's view of publishers.King's last novel was also sold over the Net, but that was a regular business transaction through certain authorised websites only. This time, anyone can get the thing, as long as they stick by the honour system and send off a dollar. Part one will be posted on 24 July and part two on 21 August. As long as at least three-quarters of readers pay up, part three will be there in September."I'm counting on two things," he said "The first is plain old honesty. Take what you want and pay for it, as the old saying goes."The second is that you'll like the story enough to want to read more If you do want more, you have to pay Pay and the story rolls, steal and the story folds No stealing from the blind newsboy!". The English writer Alan Moore has just published one of the most ambitious, formally innovative and densely researched works of historical fiction of recent years.

Its huge cast of characters includes the visionary likes of the three Williams - William Blake, William Morris and William Butler Yeats; its unorthodox speculations draw on scholarly works as diverse as Robert Graves's The White Goddess and Julian Jayne's Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, as well as on art-historical studies of Nicholas Hawskmoor and Walter Sickert, Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor and the classical historian Diodorus Siculus. Politically, it encompasses Gladstone's Irish policy, the Madhi uprisings and the French invasion of Indochina. It is, in short, just the kind of work that ought to rocket straight on to the Booker shortlist Or it would do, if it were a novel But it's not It's a comic. The English writer Alan Moore has just published one of the most ambitious, formally innovative and densely researched works of historical fiction of recent years. Its huge cast of characters includes the visionary likes of the three Williams - William Blake, William Morris and William Butler Yeats; its unorthodox speculations draw on scholarly works as diverse as Robert Graves's The White Goddess and Julian Jayne's Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, as well as on art-historical studies of Nicholas Hawskmoor and Walter Sickert, Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor and the classical historian Diodorus Siculus. Politically, it encompasses Gladstone's Irish policy, the Madhi uprisings and the French invasion of Indochina. It is, in short, just the kind of work that ought to rocket straight on to the Booker shortlist Or it would do, if it were a novel But it's not.

It's a comic. Worse still, From Hell is a comic about Jack the Ripper - very much an X-certificate horror comic, too, in which the drawings by Moore's collaborator Eddie Campbell boast abundant quantities of (historically accurate) coarse banter, plus many squalid copulations and more exotic forms of sexual congress, all topped off with at least one portrayal of Saucy Jack at his bloody work that is guaranteed to put you off your breakfast kipper.To echo the immortal words uttered at the time of the Chatterley trial, it is absolutely not the kind of book you would wish your wife or servants to see (though it can be very acute on the relations of masters and servants, and on social class in general). But for those willing (a) to put aside their embarrassment about reading comics once past the age of puberty and (b) to suppress the misgiving that only anoraks and sad nutters can have any interest in the Whitechapel murders of 1888, From Hell may also hold some agreeable surprises.One of them is its frank impatience with the usual thriller form. Moore plainly doesn't much care about the actual identity of Red Jack. Virtually from the outset, he makes it clear that his Ripper is going to be - why not? - the same man fingered in Stephen Knight's unhappily titled best-seller Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (1976): Sir William Gull, surgeon and Freemason.