James Patrick Kelly’s concept album, The Book of Bots, collects twelve stories and two essays, all dealing with that century-old staple of science fiction, the robot. The collection comes out at a time when the rollout of AI, automation and data centres is, to put it mildly, on the nose. The stories aren’t especially concerned with the broad social, cultural and economic issues posed by these technologies. They are more intimate than that. But the two essays cover this ground. The first, “Comedy of Science”, is an excellent short history of the robot in literature that shows how the concept, as a metaphor for economic and social concerns, has changed over time. “Robots on Parade 2026” is a well-rounded and thoughtful piece on the growth of AI and robotics and the ethical challenges raised by these technologies.

The collection’s first story, “Itsy Bitsy Spider”, written close to thirty years ago, sees Jennifer visit her estranged thespian father, who is suffering from dementia. Living in an artificial suburb constructed to mimic the 20th century, Peter Fancy’s caregiver is a child-sized robotic facsimile of Jennifer, complete with her memories. This comes as a rude shock to Jennifer, who, along with her mother, was abandoned by Peter. But this isn’t an angry story; rather, as Jennifer gets to know her younger, robotic self, it transitions into a sad, sometimes wistful piece about memory and familial love.

In his Foreword, Kelly pairs “Itsy Bitsy Spider” with “Uncanny” (penned seventeen years later) because both stories deal with automatons in a domestic setting. Here, the robot plays the role of boyfriend and, as such, the story is a much lighter and funnier offering than “Itsy Bitsy Spider”, even if I might have rolled my eyes at the jokey ending. (OK, I might have snorted.)

Where the bot in “Uncanny” is sold as a true boyfriend, nookie included, Tate from “Your Boyfriend Experience” is more of a high-end (very high-end) sex-bot. Dakarai has been asked by his partner, Jin—Tate’s primary designer—to test out the sex-bot’s functionality. Not so much the sexy stuff (though Tate’s carnal skills underline the narrative), but how Tate interacts with the world. It’s not entirely shocking when Dak, who gets very little emotional feedback from Jin, becomes attached to Tate. This might be one of my favourite stories in the collection because it’s less focused on the tech and more on raw emotion. Dare I say it, but it’s a rather “literary” story.

“Yukui!” centres on the artificial companion (sex-bot) rather than the customer. When Sprite’s human dies, she’s transferred to the man’s aloof brother. Sprite struggles to deal with the change in ownership but is all the more horrified when she’s offered freedom. This is more the typical “what does a robot do with its freedom?” narrative, and it’s a very good example of the type.

Christ. 500 words into the review and I’m leaving the impression that the collection is wall-to-wall sex-bots (not that there’s anything wrong with that). The other tales (mostly) blend automata with other SF tropes. There’s the familiar but still entertaining “10¹⁶ to 1”, which sees a robot travel back to 1962 to alter history (yes, it involves the Cuban Missile Crisis). Our narrator is the adult Raymond Beaumont, who encountered the bot when he was 12 and has been haunted by the experience ever since.

In the wonderfully imaginative and definitely bonkers “Undone”, a sentient starship cares for its single crew member, Mada, a Trueborn escaping her Utopian enemies by jumping twenty million years into the future. The weirdness of the conceit gradually shifts into a touching love story between Mada and Owen, the wide-eyed poet she meets on a bucolic Earth.

Speaking of infrastructure that cares for its owner, the bittersweet “Bernardo’s House” is told from the perspective of a sentient house constructed to satisfy the needs (yes, sexual—but it’s not a sex-bot!!!!) of its titular owner. One day, Bernardo vanishes, and the world outside changes. The House is alone, that is, until it encounters a homeless girl named Fly. It’s one of several stories, including “Yukui!” and “What It Means To Be A Car”, where Kelly explores what it means for an enslaved consciousness to suddenly taste (and possibly reject) freedom. In contrast, the collection’s most recent piece, the excellent “Je Ne Regrette Rien”, features a group of Chinese robots who crave independence. However, faced with prejudice from a society angered by automation, they have to hide their desires or risk being shut down.

There are other great stories, like “Embot’s Lament”, which sees another time-travelling robot (or AI), forbidden to interfere, help a woman in the past leave her abusive husband; the quirky and disturbing “The Best Christmas Ever”, where a family of bots looks after the last two people on Earth; and the touching and funny “Grace’s Family”, set on an ancient intelligent starship, where the crew (set up as a family unit) help the ship chart and interpret the vastness of the universe.

Putting aside my jokes about the preponderance of sex-bot tales, it’s the diversity of the stories that makes the collection such an enjoyable and fascinating read.

Subscribe now

No 700-word review can do justice to Flann O’Brien’s modernist, metafictional, madcap masterpiece1 At Swim-Two-Birds. Just attempting to describe the nested plot is a mug’s game (though, because I love you all, I’ll still do it). Even if you survive that, good luck charting all the references, whether he’s being playful with Irish myth and legend or dropping in the odd Joycean Easter egg, extolling the virtues of plain,2 or musing about the nature of the novel as an artistic form. I’m sure—yes, you—picked up on every allusion and got all the jokes. But plebs like me had to either resort to Wikipedia or just let it wash over me.

The point being, At Swim-Two-Birds, despite only being around 230 pages long, is a novel with so many layers that anything I write here will not scratch, in fact barely scrape, the novel’s capacious depths.3

Narrative the first: When he’s not smoking, drinking with his mates or pissing off his uncle, a Dublin student writes an experimental novel about the novelist Dermot Trellis.

Narrative the second: Dermot Trellis lives at the Red Swan Hotel. He’s a bit of a hack and a puritan who’s penning a moralistic tale. His characters—including John Furriskey, Paul Shanahan and Antony Lamont—are a mixture of borrowed and invented figures, because “characters should be interchangeable as between one book and another”.

Narrative the third: Furriskey, Lamont and Shanahan hate Trellis and escape his control. Furriskey especially, who is born fully grown (“he entered the world with a memory but without a personal experience to account for it”), and was created to attack (and possibly rape) women, falls in love with his expected victim Peggy. In the meantime, Trellis creates Sheila Lamont, Antony’s sister. So overcome by her beauty, Trellis “forgets himself” and rapes her, a horrible act that ends in the birth of Trellis’s son, Orlick.4

Narrative the fourth: Orlick, an author like his father, writes, at the urging of Lamont, Furriskey and Shanahan, a tale where Trellis is punished by the Pooka and then put on trial. Shenanigans ensue.

And Tangents?: Too many to mention here. There’s this subplot/digression involving the Pooka Fergus MacPhellimey5 and his encounter with the Good Fairy. This whole passage/section is hilarious. The Good Fairy is a disembodied voice that’s never where you think it is. We also encounter Mad Sweeny (or King Sweeny), who, as per Irish folklore, is cursed into a bird-like existence—the novel’s title refers to Snámh-dá-én, or Swim-Two-Birds, where Sweeny visits a church—and Finn MacCool, the great Irish warrior. And there’s more. Probably. Like I say, I didn’t pick it all.

At Swim-Two-Birds is a playful love letter to everything Irish, including the delight of drinking beer (sorry, porter) in a grotty bar with your grotty mates. It’s also a young man’s6 attempt to push the novel to its limits in a vein that’s different to Joyce or the other modernists. It’s also fucking funny, like burst-out-laughing hilarious. And maybe most important of all it hasn’t aged a day. It’s as experimental and ambitious and original as it was when published in 1939; only around 240 copies sold before most of the remaining stock was destroyed in the Blitz the following year. I’m glad that people like Graham Greene, Dylan Thomas and Borges helped keep its reputation alive long enough for it to be republished several times and grow a cult following,7 only to eventually fall into my hands nearly ninety years later. I now need to read The Third Policeman. Sooner rather than later.

Subscribe now

It’s incredible that M. John Harrison’s The End of Everything was longlisted for the Booker.1 It’s not the weirdest novel on the list that I’ve read. That would be Makenna Goodman’s Helen of Nowhere.2 But still, for a mainstream award, even one that’s more genre-friendly than it’s given credit for,3 The End of Everything is a bold, courageous choice. To say it’s opaque with the logic of a fever dream doesn’t really cut it. Harrison has written a deeply strange, uncomfortable, sometimes shocking novel. It’s a narrative told mostly in an affectless tone that is both distancing and visceral. As Niall Harrison keenly observes in his excellent review of The End of Everything: “[the] sentences are so precisely commanding that I felt pinioned, unable to think outside of their premises while I was reading them.”

Humanity has been invaded by the iGhetti. It’s never explained what they are or why they’re called the iGhetti. But the lowercase “i”, mimicking (mocking?) the naming conventions of Apple’s ubiquitous hardware, suggests they are born out of our obsessions with technology.4 Harrison’s first description of the iGhetti, with overtones of Wittgenstein, is supremely evocative:

They had seemed at first like neither a thing nor a picture of a thing: they seemed to be extruded from a space that wasn’t quite in the world.

A little later we’re told that they look like “a kind of transparent jelly that was not to be confused with ectoplasm.”5 The iGhetti initially congregate around bodies of water. They then spread towards major cities, attracted to cultural sites like galleries and museums, where they construct a structure nearby. Anyone not living in London witnesses a war above the city — of helicopters and bombers and the pulsing luminosity of the iGhetti.

Society collapses not due to war but because of a lack of shared reality. The iGhetti have pockmarked existence with “bad patches”, floating anomalies that warp and distort time and space, making an already disorienting situation impossible to navigate. That’s the case for Phillip Tennant and his aunt Marnie, who aren’t so much struggling to come to terms with the catastrophe as already irrevocably changed by it. Phillip is a beachcomber searching for iGhetti cast-offs, human-shaped biological artefacts. When he finds a specimen, he brings it to Marnie, who, disgusted, lets it loose into the wild. As Phillip goes to hunt the artefact, Marnie is forced to leave her community after she slits the throat of a feral child who was pissing on her. This is one of those shocking moments — there are a few — where the prose is so devoid of emotion yet so startling that you gasp (or I did).

The End of Everything does read like a shout into the abyss about the dehumanising influence of technology. But also, it’s just a remarkably evocative, disturbing, fucked-up work of fiction. For all its fractal oddness, its unexpected swerves, its eruptions of violence, and its cool, exquisitely poised prose, this novel, more than most of the contemporary fiction I’ve read this year, captures the slow collapse of our society, that sense that we’re losing everything that’s wonderful and remarkable about humanity and replacing it with acts of cruelty and hate. The end of everything indeed.

Subscribe now

I finished Douglas Stuart’s John of John just as it was announced that it had been longlisted for the Booker. Even before I picked it up, I had a strong feeling it would feature on awards lists and end-of-year round-ups. Not an especially bold guess on my part. Stuart won the Booker for his debut Shuggie Bain (a book I have not read1) and John of John received glowing reviews when it came out in May. What finally got me across the line was the NYT Book Review Book Club choosing John of John as July’s book.

That’s a whole lot of needless throat-clearing and justification to say that I really liked John of John. I know saying you were “moved” by a novel is a flogged-to-death cliché, but John of John absolutely fits the bill.

The novel is the story of two gay men (well, actually, three gay men… but we will circle back to that), both named John. If you’re smarter than me, the title will have clued you into the fact that the Johns are father and son. Neither has come out as gay. Not because the novel is set in the 1990s, when the stigma of AIDS was still front of mind, but because both men are part of a deeply devout Calvinist community. John Macleod, the elder, is a sheep farmer, weaver and respected member of the Free Presbyterian Church who knows he will be expelled from the church if he’s found to be gay. His son, John-Calum, who goes by Cal, has been attending a textile school on the mainland and, as such, has been a little more open about his sexuality. But on the pretext that his grandmother, Ella, is ailing, his father guilts Cal into returning to the (fictional) town of Falabay.

In truth, Ella is perfectly healthy—as healthy as an old woman can be while enduring the bitter, windy, rainy, rocky surroundings of Falabay. Ella, who was by far my favourite character, is outspoken and oddly charming, but also very canny and careful (when she needs to be), and manipulated Cal’s return for reasons of her own. The point is, the twenty-something (who, to be fair, is skint; there’s not much design work on offer for a graduate in 1990s Scotland) returns to a place where he has to hide who he is from everyone he knows. The exception is his best friend, Doll. Before he left for the mainland, Cal and Doll were occasional lovers. Cal is also unaware that his father is gay and in love with the next-door neighbour, Innes MacInnes (yes, cracking name), both men hiding their shared affection from the small community.

It’s an emotional minefield, made all the more challenging by Cal’s mother, Grace (Ella’s daughter), who left John for John’s brother after she found her husband with Innes.2 While she has no intention of ever revealing her husband’s secret, when Ella dies, it’s Grace who will inherit the house and the croft, throwing John out onto the street.

So, yeah, plenty going on.3 But Stuart paces the novel like a pro, skilfully juggling story with character. I found it interesting that, despite the title, the novel increasingly centres on John’s relationship with Innes, one he can’t fully embrace or sometimes even acknowledge (even in secret behind thick curtains), so riven is he by guilt. A guilt he takes out on his son physically and psychologically. Cal further complicates things by falling for Innes, a situation that, in lesser hands, would be ripe for melodrama, but instead speaks to a desire, a yearning, shrouded in shame and concealment.

As sad and tragic and mournful as John of John can sometimes be (it’s also funny; Ella cracked me up several times), it didn’t reduce me to tears.4 Stuart wants you to feel for his characters, to love them despite their flaws, but he’s also not interested in wish fulfilment or emotionally manipulative (or even cathartic) climaxes.

There’s a warning of this early in the novel when Cal replies to a “lonely hearts” ad from a man, William, living on the mainland. It’s all very awkward and tender and a little bit naughty, especially after Cal sends William a knitted facsimile of his cock (brilliant, brilliant scene). And just when we think something will come of it… Stuart says no. That’s not how this works. Cal gets a curt rejection letter back from William, cock sock included. That’s the novel in a nutshell, Stuart reminding us that life is difficult, that no matter how hard we work, or how nice we are, or how much we love, things don’t always play out the way we want them to. And if that sounds dour and earnest and bleak, fear not. There will be few books you read this year so full of life.

Subscribe now

I believe it was an ecstatic Facebook post from Jeff VanderMeer that drew my attention to the novel Weak in Comparison to Dreams by historian and art critic James Elkins. I did what I usually do when someone I respect recommends a book I know I won’t immediately read; I open up an Amazon product page with the future intention of purchasing the book. If I haven’t bought the novel by the end of the year, I press the x on the Safari tab. That’s what happened here. I didn’t buy Elkins’ novel.

So, what changed? It was a request from The Unnamed Press to review the third volume in what’s planned to be a five-book series. It gave me the excuse to buy and read the first two novels. Now that I’ve read the oddball but often hilarious Weak in Comparison to Dreams, I know why VanderMeer was so excited. This is top-drawer experimental fiction, precisely the sort of “pushing the boundaries” novel that gets me so hot to trot these days.

Weak in Comparison to Dreams is Dr Samuel Emmer’s account of the time his boss compelled him to volunteer for an international project investigating the behavioural issues displayed by animals in captivity, notably in zoos. Small problem. Emmer has zero expertise in this area. He’s a microbiologist, with an interest in faecal bacteria, who manages the water supply of his hometown of Guelph. Emmer believes his boss has sent him on this fool’s errand just to irritate him.

There’s another problem. Emmer’s life is falling apart. His wife, Adela, has left him, returning to Estonia with their daughter, Fina. Emmer’s reaction is detached. He charts their relationship using a numerical scale—they started at zero when they first met, which rose to 900 at the height of their love. The “meter”, as he describes it, has been plunging ever since.

Emmer’s clinical perspective on his marriage speaks to who Emmer is. He cogitates rather than feels. He admits as much, telling us, “my feelings weren’t working right. Either they arrived a minute or a day too late… or they didn’t appear at all, leaving me in a vacuum.” Emmer’s affect is expressed in his plain, factual prose. When he does exhibit emotion, it’s typically in the form of cruelty, a nastiness that can be confronting (I’ll come back to that).

The novel is a Sebaldian mix of prose and photography. When Emmer is visiting a zoo, we get stark black-and-white pictures of empty enclosures. At night, Emmer dreams of an apocalyptic forest fire and we’re presented with photos of smoking brushland, denuded trees, and blackened skies. Emmer’s fascination with stereotypic behaviour in animals comes with figures and diagrams tracing their repetitive movements. Then, at the very end, an elderly Dr Emmer, reflecting on the events we’ve just read, speaks about preludes and fugues and the real and fictitious composers who wrote them, complete with musical notation. All of this—every photo, every diagram, every note—is seamlessly blended into the narrative.

If all this sounds rather earnest, academic, a bit too clever by half, it is. But it’s also fucking hilarious. As I say, Emmer can be a real dick. Out of sheer spite, he begins to psychologically torture the wardens showing him around their zoos, making up insane, easily disprovable “facts” about why the animals are displaying invariant behaviour. These passages are pure cringe, but also very funny, culminating in a visit to the zoo in Salt Lake City where he accuses the warden, Dr Preteen (great name), of sexually abusing the animals.

The extended passage that had me losing it (I went full cackle) is late in the novel, when a ninety-year-old Emmer tells us about the composer Asger Gaarn. The very fictional Gaarn wrote 693 compositions, more than 400 of them preludes and fugues dedicated to people who had just died. Initially these were dedicated to other composers he respected. By the end, it was any old codger who carked it in his vicinity, even if he barely knew them. It’s made funnier because Emmer takes Gaarn’s work so seriously.

I loved this strange novel so much I didn’t pay attention to the themes or the symbolism or the fact that Emmer is a broken man (yes, another flawed individual) who’s clearly struggling to deal with the emotional turmoil bubbling under his affectless surface. Not that it isn’t important, more that, when I wasn’t laughing, I was in awe of how Elkins uses the surrealist toolkit to tell what’s ostensibly a realist story—nothing especially uncanny or inexplicable happens. Even Emmer’s dreams, while destructive, are mostly mundane. And yet, there’s something disorientating about the novel. Maybe it’s the pictures and diagrams, maybe it’s Emmer’s obsession with preludes and fugues, maybe it’s all the depressed animals, medicated to the eyeballs on antidepressants, maybe it’s all of these things. Whatever the magic, if you have even the slightest interest in groundbreaking, experimental fiction, read this book. As for me, I’m looking forward to A Short Introduction to Anneliese.

Subscribe now

I really should let this one steep a bit more. Let the novel’s themes and ideas and plot threads percolate through my subconscious. I suppose I could, but I’m also worried I’ll never get around to jotting down my thoughts,1 and that my feelings about Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children will fade before I do. The issue isn’t so much whether I adored the novel—though I recognise that it’s a remarkable achievement—as that Rushdie’s brand of maximalism can be difficult, at least for me, to digest. It makes what’s already a long book even longer. I would typically read a novel of Midnight’s Children’s girth in around 13 hours, whereas this took me 18 hours, and that’s with skimming the odd passage.2

But, like I say, the story of Saleem Sinai—born at midnight on 15 August 1947—which is also the story of his family, starting with Saleem’s long-nosed grandfather, Dr Aadam Aziz, which is also the story of the British Raj and the eventual independence of India and Pakistan, and which, of course, loops back to Saleem’s birth, is a tremendous flight of historical imagination. That this was Rushdie’s second novel—the first was the less-than-successful Grimus3 (which I have not read4)—makes it all the more astonishing. His winning the Booker (and then the Booker of Bookers) feels, to some extent, less important.5 Midnight’s Children would be a magnificent and memorable novel without the awards.

Providing your typical reviewer’s plot summary is an almost meaningless task. Aside from the fact that the narrative is overstuffed with historical and fantastical incident, Saleem, our narrator, is not especially disciplined in telling his story—to the frustration of his girlfriend Padma. I can tell you that Dr Aziz met his wife, Naseem, the daughter of a wealthy landowner, through a hole in a sheet—the only way he was allowed to examine her when she was ill. I might also mention that, much like her father, Mumtaz Aziz met her first husband in strange circumstances. Nadir Khan was hiding under the floorboards of the family home—with Dr Aziz’s permission—after opposing Partition and witnessing the assassination of the movement’s leader.

And now that I’ve introduced Mumtaz, I should probably tell you that she is Saleem’s mother. Not biologically, though. He’s actually the product of a departing English landowner (William Methwold) and the poor wife of a street entertainer (Vanita). For a long time, Mumtaz—renamed Amina by her husband, Ahmed—doesn’t know that the midwife, Mary Pereira, switched Amina’s baby with Vanita’s (Vanita dies in childbirth). Why did Mary do this? Well, it’s complex and has much to do with the revolutionary Joseph D’Costa and his views on class, but that’s a rabbit hole I’m gonna leave to you, dear reader, to discover.

I haven’t even mentioned that Saleem and Shiva, born at the same moment—the stroke of midnight—are both bequeathed magical powers, along with all the other children born in the first hour of the newly independent nations’ soon-to-be-turbulent histories. And what about the Brass Monkey (my favourite character by a mile), or Parvati-the-Witch (who appears late in the novel but whose arc is the most tragic, which is saying something given the number of corpses that litter the narrative), or the other Midnight’s Children: one who can change gender, another who can travel through any reflective surface and a third who can fly? Or, of course, Shiva, Saleem’s twin, who is graced with extraordinary fighting abilities, with knees so powerful they can crush and strangle.6

All of this, the magical and the mundane, circles back to a story about the troubled births of India and Pakistan. I’m no expert on this period, so I can’t say whether Rushdie adequately captures the turmoil. The fact that this is history told through a magical realist lens doesn’t dilute its visceral power. I’m left recognising that, while independence is precious, the deep scars left by the British meant that there wasn’t sufficient governance or infrastructure in place to support stable governments in either country. Or, to put it another way, as Saleem experiences at a personal level, forging a country’s identity can be (though it doesn’t need to be) a painful, bloody experience.

I haven’t quoted much from the book. To get the full taste, I would need to cut and paste whole slabs. But if this is your first time reading Midnight’s Children, be prepared for a sumptuous feast, one that will fill you up well before you finish it.

Subscribe now

I’m late to the party. It isn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last.

My reason for not immediately consuming Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume is twofold.1 I read a couple of negative reviews on Substack2 and, while I adore time travel, I’m not actually that fond of time loops.3 It’s a limited concept that loses its novelty once you’ve seen it performed a couple of times. I wasn’t sure I could be bothered starting a seven-book sequence about a woman living the same day again, and again, and again.4

What tipped me over the edge was my old mate Niall Harrison (whom I’ve never met in person5). He’s a superb critic—has been for two decades—and if he says a book is worth your time, you should definitely push it up the TBR pile. Niall has been quietly recommending this series of novels for two years now, and I felt it was time to at least give the first volume a crack.

And, yeah, it’s great. The hype is (mostly) justified.

As Naomi says (see footnote 1), those opening pages where our time-looped protagonist, Tara, is describing the mundanity of her daily existence—

I keep track of the days. I keep track of the sounds in the house. When it is quiet, I do nothing. I lie down and rest on the bed or I read a book, but I make no sound. Or hardly any. I breathe. I get up and tiptoe about the room. The sounds carry me around.

—are anodyne in action and devoid of emotion (AKA, boring as shit). If this is all the novel was, I would simply have stopped reading.6 The novel’s tone does gradually change in register (the subtlety is what makes it good7) and, more importantly (to me), Balle departs from the conventional time-loop arc in several key ways. I’m not going to spoil all the tweaks she makes, but the most profound is the fact that while Tara, the co-owner of an antiquarian bookstore, is trapped in the same day—18 November—she’s not (or doesn’t need to be) trapped in the same place. She resets temporally, not physically. In practice, that means she can start her day in Clarion-sous-Bois (where she lives with her husband, Thomas), end it in Bordeaux (where she travels to secure rare books for her customers), and wake the next (same) morning still in her Bordeaux hotel room. So, unlike Phil Connors from Groundhog Day, Tara isn’t forced to relive the same series of events again and again and again. She could fly to London and experience 18 November there. Tara is trapped, but her prison is the size of the planet.

Balle also cleverly subverts the more familiar elements of a time-loop narrative. We know before the chronic hysteresis8 that Tara was drifting from her husband, Thomas (apparently a shared love of old books just isn’t enough to keep a flame burning). But as Tara convinces Thomas that she’s caught in an endless loop, they rekindle that love, which makes each reset all the more tragic. Watching Tara repeatedly return to Thomas to explain what has happened, only for him to struggle to stay awake past midnight in the desperate hope of remembering, is as poignant as it is heartbreaking.

I’m not sure when I’ll be reading volume two, but whenever I do, I know I’m in for the long haul.

Subscribe now

I read Moby Dick1, partly for the Star Trek quotes2 but mostly because I’d been meaning to read it for several years. I was going to “beach read” it on holiday several years back—even bought a copy from the local bookstore—but ultimately I picked a random day in June and knocked the novel off in five days.

I’d been told the chapters devoted to whaling were boring. This is not true. I found all the stuff about the different genera of whales, the logistical effort involved in hunting them, and the complex, bloody process of rendering a whale down to its constituent elements fascinating. Then there’s Melville’s literary analysis of the mythology surrounding whales, stretching back to Jonah and Pliny the Elder (gotta love a bit of Pliny). It’s brilliant, capturing the otherworldly quality of these creatures.3 Melville even goes so far as to argue with those Nantucketers—including an old Sag Harbor whaleman—who deny the historicity of Jonah’s tale.

Setting aside the whale facts, mythology, and the novel’s literary and cultural significance, Moby Dick doesn’t get enough plaudits for being really funny. The first third of the novel, in which Ishmael, a schoolteacher, arrives in New Bedford, meets Queequeg (one of literature’s great bromances), and travels with him to Nantucket, where they sign aboard the Pequod, has some truly laugh-out-loud moments. Obviously, there’s the initial awkwardness of Ishmael and Queequeg sharing a bed, which blossoms into true (platonic?) love. But how about Queequeg’s shrunken heads? Or the eccentric Captains Peleg and Bildad (part owners of the Pequod)? Or Ishmael’s religious devotion to chowder? And so on.

And this is all before cranky-pants Ahab enters the scene.

In fact, if I was being picky, Ahab’s presence does leach some of the colour out of the novel. His all-consuming pursuit of Moby Dick, while a terrific, vivid depiction of monomania, starts to wear thin after a while.4 Maybe Melville recognised this, which is why we seem to get more whale facts and observations in the second half. He also surrounds Ahab with larger-than-life characters like the second mate, Stubb, and the other harpooners. Starbuck, the first mate, is also a wonderful character, the only one to call Ahab out on his shit.

What’s interesting is that Ishmael, who I imagine is telling this very long story, whale lore included, to a crowded pub, fades into the background as he lets the narrative take over. It’s a neat trick on Melville’s part, and adds to the climax, where it’s revealed that he’s the only survivor.5

As for the titular whale… Herman, you knocked that one right out of the park. After hundreds of pages of hype, he’s somehow more frightening in the flesh.6 I’m not going to pretend I fully understood the logistics of the final three chapters, but the intent was clear. Ahab refuses to admit defeat, despite Moby treating him, his crew, and their ship like a loose collection of twigs. It’s monstrous and frightening.

So, yes, Moby Dick is a stupendous piece of writing. The short chapters (which, again, no one ever speaks about) and the episodic structure mean it is accessible. You can chew off little bits and never feel you’re losing the narrative thread. Don’t listen to the naysayers, like the early critics who were befuddled7 or the people on Reddit or Discord or even Substack who’ll tell you it’s dull. Moby Dick—whale and novel—is the real deal!

Subscribe now

The funny thing about Nathaniel Rich, at least to me, is that I’ve read two of his novels (including this one) but have never got around to reading a book by his brother Simon Rich despite owning most (possibly all) of his collections. The thing is, I know I will love Simon’s surrealist, genre-inflected short fiction if I crack open a cover. I’ve enjoyed the couple of stories I’ve heard on This American Life and I adored Simon Rich’s TV series Man Seeking Woman. Yet, when it comes to the jottings of the Rich brothers, it’s only ever been Nathaniel—first King Zeno, which is awesome, and now Cloudthief, which is not as awesome but still pretty good.1

The novel is set (initially) in New York just over a decade ago, around the time when the phrase “cloud computing” was becoming ubiquitous, but before we2 really understood the massive, physical, resource-guzzling infrastructure that underpinned it. Our unnamed narrator is a freelance journalist known for his urgent sound-the-alarm work on the coming climate apocalypse. When we meet him, he’s with his mate Ces, a shady fellow who insists you can make easy money stealing shit from self-storage facilities. Although he initially dismisses the idea, Ces convinces him (though he doesn’t need to push that hard) that there might be a story in it—even if it means breaking the law. Anywho, they gain access to the facility, open a few storage units, find them (disappointingly) filled with people’s detritus, and decide to head home with a modest haul (that’s overstating things).

But before they leave, Ces shows the narrator a unit that’s locked from the inside. Living in said unit, as they’ll soon discover, is Virginia. The narrator’s first impression is not entirely positive: “Her teeth were snaggled to some minor degree that gave her face a serpentine cast, though her lips were full, red. She did not strike me as pretty, at least not in any conventional way… She was hard, like a crag, or shaved ice.” But when she smiles, “…the glacier melted, revealing a dancing girlish silliness.” Yes, our narrator can be a bit of an objectifying dick.

Anyway, it turns out that Virginia is not a crazy person but is instead living off the grid. She has spent the last several years erasing her digital identity. She makes money using crypto to bet on prediction markets. It’s Virginia who suggests to the narrator—who has promptly fallen in love with her—that they steal some servers from one of Google’s data centres.3

This is maybe the fiftieth contemporary book4 I’ve read this year featuring wounded, dysfunctional people. I’m blaming the 2016 wave of populism that hammered the last nail in the coffin of society.5 In this case, while our narrator can be an arse, and while Virginia is, at times, so opaque as to be impenetrable, Rich does a terrific job showing us glimpses of who they once were and what they might have been if they hadn’t endured difficult childhoods—traumatic ones in Virginia’s case.

The cloud computing, data-centre stuff is fine if you don’t know the history (which I do). The heist is hilariously basic—it’s no Ocean’s Eleven. But I liked it, especially the narrator leaning on fiction to research the typical pitfalls of heist-ery. (He’s constantly expecting Virginia to betray him. And she sort of does … but also, she sort of doesn’t.)

Cloudthief is also a book about books (copyright Andy Miller), or, specifically, one book: Véronique Le Guen’s Seule au fond du gouffre. It’s a memoir, never translated into English, about the months Le Guen spent alone in a cave. The book is about loneliness and isolation—a reflection of the narrator’s state of mind and, we start to realise, Virginia’s.

There’s more. I haven’t mentioned the narrator’s sister, who is suffering from Usher syndrome—an illness that becomes increasingly central to the story. There’s also a subplot involving classified Pentagon information regarding UFOs, or unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). It’s not as bonkers as it sounds; it’s just one of the quirky threads that weave their way through the novel.

While not every aspect of Cloudthief worked for me (the UAP stuff is an example, mostly because it feels like it’s going somewhere and then doesn’t), I was never not entertained and emotionally invested in this surprisingly slim novel. Good work, Nathaniel Rich. And again, sorry, Simon.

Subscribe now

If you read as much genre fiction as I do, you can’t avoid stumbling across vampire fiction, even if you’re not actively looking for it. To say vampires are ubiquitous would be like saying there’s a decent amount of water in the ocean. In the past, I’ve groaned about this because, while I love horror and Salem’s Lot is one of my all-time favourite novels, I find (or found) vampires conceptually dull.

But. In recent years, although I haven’t deliberately sought out vampire and vampire-adjacent fiction, the books I’ve read have been great. Just this year, I’ve enjoyed books like Dead Collections by Isaac Fellman and Cabaret in Flames by Hache Pueyo, the latter of which received an enthusiastic Locus review from moi. Last year I read The Midnight Shift, which, despite its bloody-lipped cover, is an inventive and rather bloodless (in a good way) vampire novel.

The Flayed Man by Chloe Lauter is as good as all these novels. What it shares with them is an interesting take on a trope that somehow, beyond all reason, keeps being reinvented. The conceit is that the vampiric condition is hereditary, a curse passed on, depending on which myth or legend you believe in, through the sexual congress between a blood-sucking monster1 (the “v” word is never used) and a human woman. The concept of a genetic lineage is fascinating, but it isn’t the novel’s most interesting idea. Rather, it’s that (a) other than a need for blood, none of the usual vampire stuff applies when the individual is in human form; (b) it only takes a three- to four-millilitre vial of blood, injected directly into the vein, to satiate their appetite; (c) those afflicted with the curse still need to eat regular food, even if it doesn’t taste as good; and (d) if they don’t inject every twenty-four hours, they will transform into a monster in the most dramatic and violent way possible, with bones erupting through their skin. Nice.

But even that isn’t what’s so good about The Flayed Man. It’s the fact that this is such an intimate, small tale in which what’s at stake is a daughter’s ability to care for her mother. Our protagonist, Ellis Karsten, is a nurse who works the night shift. Not because she’s a vampire (as I first thought), but because it lets her care for her mother during the day—a nuanced and cleverbit of subversion that plays with our expectations about vampire lore.2

In fact, everything Ellis does is in aid of her mother. She has no life, no friends, no hobbies, no outlet. The only person Ellis regularly sees who isn’t a co-worker or her mother is Uncle Bill, her source of blood. (He snaffles discarded blood samples from the phlebotomy lab where he works.) It’s all the more miserable because Ellis’s mother treats her daughter like shit. Yes, it’s the dementia, causing abrupt shifts in her mother’s mood—one moment needy, the next paranoid—but it’s not like their relationship was ever peachy. Ellis genuinely believes she’s never been good enough for her mother.

What I found so beautifully layered about Ellis’s relationship with her mother is that she isn’t bitter. Lonely. Yes. Guilt-ridden. Maybe. But not bitter. She loves her mother. Ellis won’t countenance killing her, no matter how often Uncle Bill suggests it. He believes his sister is ruining Ellis’s life. But he also knows, just like Ellis, that eventually her mother will lose control and be consumed by hunger. And that does not end well.

The plot kicks into gear when Uncle Bill vanishes, taking the blood with him. Desperate for the red stuff, Ellis reaches out to one of her uncle’s shady associates who lives alone in the desert. But as her bloodlust grows and she becomes increasingly unable to trust herself, Ellis leans on Veer, a co-worker she trusts and has a thing for, to accompany her on a road trip deep into the Mojave. That’s right, in among everything else we also get a messy and intense queer love story.

The Flayed Man is an emotionally complex and whip-smart vampire novel. Because it’s short and the product of a small press3, it could get lost in the morass of fiction published every week. So, here I am, bringing it to your attention.

Subscribe now

This is where the hypocrisy kicks in.

In my review of Ben Lerner’s Transcription, I said I disliked Lerner’s work because I found it less about story and more about clever word games and allusions. You could level the same accusation at Gwendoline Riley’s new novel, The Palm House—there’s bugger all plot, with a greater focus on language and style. But I loved The Palm House while I thought Transcription was fine. The difference comes down to the prose. Compared to Lerner, Riley is another class at the sentence level. She’s also much, much funnier. The amusing broken iPhone scene in Transcription is kindergarten stuff for Riley, who writes with a wit that’s razor-sharp. So, even if I didn’t entirely understand what the novel is about or why its called The Palm House,1 I absolutely and unreservedly loved the book.

Like Transcription, The Palm House is wafer-thin, barely a novella, let alone a novel. You could read it in a couple of hours, but I would recommend you don’t. Partly because it’s worth savouring Riley’s prose, but mostly because you’ll miss all the nuance. It’s the sort of book you should read twice, maybe three times, to get the full Gwendoline Riley experience. I, of course, read it once. Very quickly. In two hours. I am a bad reader.

What’s it about? Sooooo basically, the novel chronicles Laura Miller’s mostly platonic relationships with a series of middle-aged men and one sexual predator masquerading as a comedian. The key relationship, which bookends the novel, is Laura’s friendship with Edmund Putnam. Putnam is, or was, an editor at Sequence. He leaves the magazine because he loathes the new editor, Simon “Shove” Halfpenny, a thirty-something brought in to turn Sequence into “a sort of London version of the New Yorker”. Putnam’s retelling of the first editorial meeting with Shove is both infuriating and hilarious. I’m sure it’s also an authentic depiction of the current state of the magazine industry in the UK (and probably the US), where Sequence’s new motto, as Shove proudly exclaims, is that nothing is boring.2

If that was the whole novel, a satire of the UK publishing industry–noting, because I haven’t yet mentioned it, that Laura is a freelance writer and editor–I would be very happy. But Riley flashes back to Laura’s past, depicting her childhood and her relationship with her mother, which has a taste of her previous novel, My Phantoms. As a teenager, she, unfortunately, encounters popular comedian Chris Patrick. Here the novel takes a darker turn because Patrick, aside from being a drug-addled arsehole, is also a paedophile who sexually abuses fifteen-year-old Laura. Given how funny (and a tad melancholy) the early section with Putnam is, this does, tonally, come out of the blue. But, my God, the writing. Laura’s innocence, her desire not to “get anything wrong”, is just heartbreaking.3

That’s as dark as the novel gets. We go back to Putnam. We meet some of Laura’s other male friends, including Craig, a playwright, Lawrence, an actor (whom Laura shags), and Mitch Seiler, a TV producer whom Laura housesits for. In other words, lots of creative middle-aged men. All these friendships are a mixture of the awkward, the nice-to-hang-out-with-in-a-pub and the deep and meaningful (that would be Putnam).

As if she’s taking the piss (and maybe she is), Riley ends the novel (this really isn’t a spoiler) with Laura talking to a plumber, no less. It shouldn’t work, but it absolutely does.

Subscribe now

I had no plans to read Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke. Even with a hint of time travel, I didn’t feel I was the audience for a novel about a tradwife influencer who wakes one morning to find herself in the 1850s, forced to live the life she’s been cosplaying for likes. But then the New York Times Book Club decided to cover it, which forced my hand.1 I should have gone with my gut.

Yesteryear isn’t an atrocious novel. I’d heard the writing was poor, but at a sentence level, it’s mostly fine. Lines like “My name is Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive” elicit an eye-roll, but they’re also in keeping with the deluded, narrow worldview of our protagonist. I didn’t even mind some of the similes, such as: “My eldest daughter was like me, not just in likeness but in disposition, too: she held her intelligence like a knife behind her back.” If I hadn’t been ill while reading Yesteryear, I would have zipped through it in two days. The point being, it’s accessible, and once you get into the guts of it, the novel is mildly entertaining.2

My issues with Yesteryear are threefold. Let’s start with the characters.

Natalie is deliberately unsympathetic and unlikeable from the get-go. She’s the quintessential tradwife made famous on Instagram, all clean living and Christian values. She lives with her husband, Caleb, on Yesteryear Ranch in Idaho with their five kids and a sixth on the way. Natalie’s interior life (her worldview) is exactly what you imagine it to be: she’s an anti-feminist who sees career women, or, as she labels them, “Angry Women”, as anathema to healthy Western civilisation. Much of the novel is Burke’s attempt to explain how Natalie got this way. None of it, from her religious upbringing to being bullied at college by proto-Angry Women to her lack of self-worth, is especially convincing. It all feels like a series of boxes being ticked. Here is the recipe for creating a reactionary farmer’s wife who glows on Instagram.

The same goes for the rest of the cast. For a novel about a woman who carefully curates her reality, hiding every truth behind a tasteful veneer, the characters lack any sort of depth. Caleb is a blank slate who collects conspiracy theories like my clothes accumulate lint. His father, Senator Doug Mills, is a cookie-cutter example of a right-wing, corrupt, MAGA-lite politician. His wife is, surprise, surprise, addicted to benzos. Natalie’s 21-year-old producer, Shannon, is pure Gen Z, down to her pink hair and nose ring. It’s all so dull and predictable.

Then there’s the twist. I didn’t buy it, and not just because I didn’t see it coming. Obviously, I won’t spoil the reveal, but it requires a level of suspension of disbelief that I wasn’t willing or able to muster.3 But even if you accept the twist at face value, it makes a mockery of everything that comes before it.

Finally, the themes are so undercooked they expose the reader to the literary equivalent of E. coli. Yesteryear is fundamentally about toxic ideologies. Most of those critiqued by Burke come from the right, such as the manosphere and reactionary “Christian values”,4 but she also seems to be having a crack at a certain “Angry Women” vein of feminism. That the manosphere and Christian nationalism are bad is not a revelation. It’s how those ideologies twist good people that’s interesting. But that would require believable characters, none of whom feature in this novel.

Yes, there’s the odd good line. Yes, there are some decent set pieces, such as when Natalie gets her leg caught in a trap trying to escape the 1855 homestead. Some of it is even funny; Burke does a good piss-take of influencer culture. But it’s all skin-deep. Which, yes, I appreciate is sort of the point. If anything, the novel is about how faux-authenticity is ruining modern America. But Yesteryear is never able to escape the velocity of its own artificiality.5

Subscribe now

I’ve never been a fan of Ben Lerner’s fiction. I read 10:04 back when I was punishing myself by reading all the novels nominated for the major awards. With word choices like “dissimulation”, “coition” and “lexicon of property”—what the fuck is a lexicon of property!?—I found the narrator “so far up his own arse that the only time he ever saw light was when he opened his mouth.”1

By the time I wrote my very short review of The Topeka School, I had only just become aware of autofiction (oh, I was so naive). I thus realised the guy with the stick up his arse was Ben Lerner (or a fictional analogue of him). That knowledge made The Topeka School marginally less annoying because at least the voice was authentic to Lerner. (I did say marginally.)

Yet despite my reservations, I keep picking up Lerner’s novels. It’s not because I’m a glutton for punishment but because I know his work will be part of the “discourse”, whether I like it or not. Or, to put it another way, if I don’t read Lerner, I’ll experience the literary equivalent of FOMO. I get that it’s irrational, but I never claimed to be otherwise.2

As it happens, I liked Transcription. There are fewer five-dollar words (I didn’t stumble across a single lexicon of property); the fictional Lerner plays a more passive role—he’s listening rather than talking—and there are parts of the novel that are funny, with even several moments that are truly moving.3 It’s still very much a Ben Lerner novel, with all the clever-clever thematic and structural stuff, like how the first and last sections mirror each other or Lerner’s observations on our unthinking reliance on technology. But you can mostly ignore all that guff and focus on the story (what there is of it).

I even forgave Lerner for the opening scene where he knocks his Apple phone into a sink full of water, and it stops working. Unless Lerner is sporting an iPhone 6, the devices have been resistant to that sort of knock-in-the-sink accident for more than a decade.4 But Lerner’s resulting panic is so human and so funny and so unexpected for a Ben Lerner novel that I squinted away the logic hole.

Of course, the dead iPhone is also important to the novel’s conceit: Lerner interviews his elderly former mentor, Thomas, and relies entirely on memory. Since this turns out to be Thomas’s last interview, Lerner’s decision to paraphrase rather than postpone things for a day to get his phone fixed becomes a point of controversy for those who respected Thomas’s work, and especially Thomas’s son (and Lerner’s close friend) Max. This leads to the third part of the triptych, in which Lerner interviews Max, who speaks about his difficult relationship with his father.

The third section is the highlight of the novel. Max’s experience with his daughter’s eating difficulties5 echoes Lerner’s concerns about his daughter, Eva, who is not enjoying school. (So much echoing.) Aside from the odd question or clarification, the Lerner-bot remains quiet, giving Max the space to speak about his daughter and his fractured, distant relationship with his father, Thomas. The writing here is heartfelt and free of most of Lerner’s tics and peccadilloes.

If you don’t like Lerner, if you think he’s the source of everything corrupt about contemporary American literature (and this ongoing obsession with MFA programs), this book ain’t going to convince you otherwise. (But then, anything written by Lerner, no matter how banal or even remarkable, is going to be treated like nuclear waste by that crowd.) For those of us, like me, who have found Lerner’s fictional persona annoying and his intellectual hijinks a little tiresome, Transcription is Lerner’s most engaging work.

Subscribe now

The Recollections is the first of two posthumous books by Chris Priest to be published in 2026. The second is The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of J.G. Ballard. I have read both, and, in very different ways, they are remarkable achievements. If I still voted for the Hugo Awards, I would need to toss a coin to split them in the “best related work” category.

Priest’s wife, Nina Allan, was instrumental to both works. She edited The Recollections and co-wrote The Illuminated Man. Her involvement with the latter, about which I will have more to say in an upcoming review, is extraordinary, a word I use far too often, but never meant more here. Her hand in shaping The Recollections, which comprises sixteen essays written by Priest, may not be as overt, but it is still profound. I got the strong impression, partly from Allan’s introduction and partly from the essays themselves, that some of these pieces, especially those dealing, albeit briefly, with Priest’s personal life and his take on the New Wave, needed some cajoling from Allan before they were written and included in The Recollections.

I’ve not read a huge amount of Priest’s work.1 I have not, for example, read The Prestige. I’ve only seen the movie. That should make reading his long essay on his experience during the making of the Nolan film, “The Magic: The Story of a Film”, a lopsided affair, especially when he embarks on a textual comparison of what’s on screen with what’s on the page. But, unlike the ambiguity that threads through his fiction, Priest is an exceptionally clear-eyed writer of non-fiction. The Nolan essay is both a masterclass in narrative non-fiction—Priest is constantly building tension, whether it’s around the possibility of The Prestige being adapted or his own fears that the movie won’t meet his high expectations—and an informative and, in its latter part, hermeneutic investigation into the art of adaptation. There’s not much inside gossip, because, as Priest tells us, Nolan never met with him. In fact, Priest was kept as far away from the project as possible. But even here, we get an incredible and intimate insight into what it’s like to have something you’ve imagined, the fruits of your creative labour, co-opted and reimagined, even remade, by another artist.

Priest also never assumes that his fascination is shared by the reader. The Rudolf Hess essay, “The Amazing Life and Death of Rudolf Hess”, is a terrific example of this. I was vaguely aware of Hess’s defection to Britain, landing in a Scottish paddock, but had no knowledge of the conspiracy surrounding his capture, trial, imprisonment and death. Priest rather tenderly charts his fascination with Hess, which began when he was a child and encountered a reference to Hess’s “flight to Britain in search of peace.” What follows is a deep dive into the works that pushed back against the official story, specifically the very Priestian idea that Hess had a body double—that is, the Hess who went to prison and eventually died there was not the real McCoy. I love this essay. Not because I now suddenly have an interest in Hess, but because I was delighted, thrilled even, by Priest’s lively passion for the subject.

The standout essay, though, is one that might never have seen the light of day but for the persuasive skills of Nina Allan. “The New Wave 1964–1968” does exactly what it says on the tin: it charts the emergence of the SF New Wave over a four-year period, by someone who was present in Michael Moorcock’s flat when the New Wave was first mooted. This is Priest at his most brutally honest. Some might say crotchety or even rude. But when he says that “Moorcock was a minor writer, one of the mediocrities, working on the fantasy fringe” or “His [Moorcock’s] jokes were weak, and he went on far too long,” Priest isn’t scoring points against his enemies,2 but rather being true to himself. And it’s because he can be so blunt, so free of spin, that (a) we trust his account and (b) find it all the more fascinating. This isn’t to say that Priest expects you either to agree with his take on Moorcock or view his version of events as the one true lore, but you are left with an insight into the New Wave that earns its value from its unvarnished honesty.

But that can be said about all of these essays. Yes, Priest can be funny. And yes, he can be a bit mean,3 but it’s his honesty that shines through. His account of watching The Prestige for the first time is one of the more beautiful and moving moments in the book. It’s beautiful because it’s so candid and sincere. Priest doesn’t change his register; he doesn’t add more superlatives; he doesn’t psycho-analyse his feelings; he just reports the truth. And it’s wonderful.

Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Nina. Thank you, Briardene.

Subscribe now

If I were going to binge-read an author at the moment (apart from old mate Stephen King), it would be Elizabeth Taylor. Right behind her would be Penelope Fitzgerald. Several years back, I read the wonderful Human Voices, and since then I’ve been meaning to dip back into Fitzgerald. Thank the literary lords, then, that Andy Miller randomly pulled Offshore out of the Gilded Amaretti Posh Bingo Tin of Destiny.1 And while I appreciate that Offshore, despite winning the Booker in 1979, isn’t the high point of Fitzgerald’s work (lots of people love The Bookshop and The Blue Flower), it’s still a damn fine book. Funny. Poignant. And a little bit sad.

If you haven’t read the back-cover blurb, the novel’s opening is bewildering. Take the first two sentences:

“‘Are we to gather that Dreadnought is asking us all to do something dishonest?’ Richard asked.

Dreadnought nodded, glad to have been understood so easily.”

It’s the literary equivalent of far-future science fiction with its neologisms and portmanteaus. In fact, if this had been written by Iain Banks, you would assume one of the People was questioning a sentient spacecraft. And actually… that’s not a million miles from the truth. It becomes clear that we’re in the middle of a meeting between the owners of boats (not spacecraft) moored on the Thames. The convention is for each person to be named after their vessel. Dreadnought’s owner is the elderly but lovable Willis, a marine artist whose only source of income are his painting. He’s looking to sell his boat so he can return to the mainland and move in with his widowed sister. The issue is that his boat isn’t even remotely seaworthy. Thus, the meeting.

The other owners include the aforementioned Richard Blake, owner of Lord Jim, meeting chair and the only one with a “proper” job (he works at an investment firm); Woodie, owner of Rochester and the former director of a small recording company; Maurice, owner of Maurice (he changed the boat’s name from Dondeschiepolschuygen IV) and a rent boy who picks up men from the nearby pub; and, finally, Nenna James, the only female owner, who lives on Grace with her daughters Martha and Tilda. Nenna purchased Grace while her husband, Edward, was away in Panama working for a construction firm. He’s now back in England, but refuses to live on the boat.

The bulk of the novel centres on the fractured relationship between Nenna and Edward, and the impact it’s having on their daughters. Twelve-year-old Martha has stopped going to school after the nuns “announced there would be a special rosary every morning… [where] the whole Junior School would pray together that Martha and Tilda’s Daddy should come back to them.” As for six-year-old Tilda, if you look precocious up in the dictionary, you’ll find her picture. She takes to Battersea Reach like she was birthed on the wharf. An early scene of Father Watson’s less-than-inspiring attempt to convince Nenna to send the girls back to school is a wonderful example of Fitzgerald’s droll sense of humour.

While the spine of Offshore is the relationship between Nenna and Edward, really the novel is a loosely gathered-together series of very funny, sometimes sad, often warm-hearted set pieces about life on a houseboat, an experience Fitzgerald knew intimately (having lived on the Thames in the early 60s).2 It’s the sort of novel that derives a sense of joy and pleasure from spending several pages following Martha and Tilda mudlarking on the Thames foreshore (where they find and sell two William de Morgan tiles). But what’s really remarkable is how Fitzgerald, in a novel this short (it’s almost a novella), brings life to even the most peripheral characters.

I don’t know if Offshore should have won the Booker. But the couple of hours I spent with it were bliss.

Subscribe now

If you were to blend together the books of Dave Barry, Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen,1 the result wouldn’t look too dissimilar from Kennedy Weible’s very funny and hugely entertaining novel, Dirty Myrtle.

Instead of Florida, where a lot of these novels seem to take place,2 Kennedy takes us to—the title is a bit of a giveaway—the South Carolina coastal city of Myrtle Beach. The first person we encounter on this journey of violence, drugs and a modicum of debauchery is Sailor Cassidy. She’s just waking up from a rough but clearly successful night at the local bar, given there’s a woman still sleeping in her bed. Picking up volleyball coaches (her name is Lula) and drunkenly bringing them back to her hovel of an apartment isn’t Sailor’s modus operandi, but she’s still feeling a bit lost and tender after breaking up with her girlfriend. While this opening isn’t integral to the plot, the subsequent conversation/shit talk between Sailor and Lula—“You only have one towel?” “My second one is in the shop. They don’t know what’s wrong with it. Maybe the hem?”—both establishes Sailor as an intriguing, spiky character you want to spend time with and the novel’s comedic and grimy tone.

Having awkwardly left her apartment, with Lula still struggling to find a clean towel and/or coffee mug, Sailor rings her sister. Carrie Cassidy has discovered that her douchebag husband, Morgan, is cheating on her, and Carrie’s lawyer says she needs evidence of infidelity before filing.3 Sailor offers to spy on Morgan and take pictures of him with his mistress, Nina. Carrie, who, unlike her sister, is sensible and measured, says, “Don’t do that.” Sailor does it anyway and, in the process, witnesses Nina’s kidnapping. When she tries to stop the men from bundling Nina into a van, she’s knocked unconscious.

In the meantime, other shit is going down. Sensible, measured Carrie is shagging the local cop, Tusk Knight.4 Unbeknownst to them, Sailor lets slip on her brother J.P.’s livestream—she doesn’t know he’s recording—that she suspects Carrie is having an affair, a speculation that butterfly-effects its way through the plot.

J.P.’s bestie and next-door neighbour, Jug, is back in town after a three-year absence. They both ran drugs for a local drug dealer, Jumper. The last time they saw each other, a staged robbery went horribly wrong, leading to the death of their mate Randy. Jug did a runner, and J.P. was left to face the music and a $10,000 debt.

And there’s more. Just when you think you’ve reached the bottom of the plot barrel, Kennedy finds another turn, another wrinkle, another antagonist.

Is there too much going on? The short answer is: no. Novels like Dirty Myrtle rely heavily on two things: a series of almost absurd coincidences that set the action in motion and layers and layers of story. In other words, it’s all part of the fun. And the fact that Kennedy juggles all these threads without dropping too many plates, balls or torches is a testament to his flow-charting skills. Not every character gets as much development as I would have liked (I’m thinking Nina here, who has a strong “Real Housewives” vibe), but that’s also not a dealbreaker, because the plot races along, driven by some cracking dialogue.5 I was never not entertained.

Dirty Myrtle is out this month.6 If you’re looking for a distraction from the endless parade of shit that defines our current moment, this will meet that need.

Subscribe now

Over on Patreon, Backlisted has given their “Master Storytellers” (those who have joined at the highest tier1) the opportunity to recommend a favourite novel for discussion on the podcast. The first book to be chosen (by Eric Beck Rubin) is P. S. Rushforth’s 1979 novel, Kindergarten.

I know it’s the lowest form of criticism to cuss in response to a work of literature, but—fuck me—this book! If you’ve not read Kindergarten, and you can handle Holocaust-related literature, then seriously consider adding this novel to your pile. I’ve read some devastating works of fiction, but Kindergarten might be right up there at the top.

I get that writing about the Holocaust is low-hanging fruit for eliciting an emotional response from the reader. But this is no The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (BURN). In fact, the Holocaust, while central to the novel, is only one of the threads that Rushforth is tugging. Kindergarten is a retelling of Hansel and Gretel that also deals with the aftereffects of a Good Friday terrorist attack on Rome’s airport that leaves three children mourning the loss of their mother.

The novel starts on Christmas Eve, 1978. Lilli Danielsohn is preparing for a German Christmas feast with her three grandchildren: Corrie, Jo and Matthias. Lilli is, or was, before she fled Germany, an artist who produced water-colour illustrations for German translations of the Brothers Grimm. Forty-nine years later, there is renewed interest in her work. She is also Jewish, though Corrie, whose perspective we follow for most of the novel, does not know this. Yet.

Corrie and his brothers—although more specifically Jo, as Matthias is too young to really understand what happened in Rome—are still processing the sudden, violent death of their mother. On the news, Corrie watches another attack unfold at a West Berlin school, with the terrorists forcing the hostage children to sing carols. Corrie’s father—who is in America organising a fundraising drive for victims of terrorism—is headmaster of Southwold School, meaning Corrie can access the school facilities. In trying to get away from his grief, he enters the school grounds and there, behind a locked door, he finds letters. They are from German-Jewish parents writing to the previous headmaster in 1938–39, ever so politely begging the school to take their children, to save them (though it’s never said explicitly) from the Nazis.

As Corrie reads these polite and deferential letters, they gradually take over the narrative. They are heartbreaking. Especially those sent by children who go back home because they can’t live without their parents, thanking the school for their help. I’m close to tears writing this. Corrie is a tad more stoic. But only a tad. When he reads these letters, Corrie is newly aware that he’s Jewish (or Jewish enough for the Nazis); he knows this is his legacy.

The revisionist takes on Hansel and Gretel that also thread the narrative (and that Lilli illustrated) are, famously, stories about children in danger. Rushforth’s takes are (mind the pun) grim, certainly not the version we are accustomed to. With the letters and the terrorist attacks, you might feel that Rushforth is over-egging the pudding, that there’s already enough sadness and dead children to go around without the retold fairytale. But Rushforth makes it work. There are layers to the grief he presents.

We can argue that Corrie and Jo are maybe a little too smart, precocious, adult-like. Corrie, a teen, sounds nothing like my 16-year-old son. But that’s the point, isn’t it? Children, including Hansel and Gretel and those sent to the gas chambers, are forced into adulthood whether they’ve asked for it or not.

In reading this novel, I can’t help but think about now, think about the children across the world growing up far too quickly. None of them, whether they live in Gaza or Iran, even have the glimmer of hope offered by a school that may take them in. The point being, Kindergarten, tragically, hasn’t aged a day.

Subscribe now

[I’m coincidentally publishing this days after the book won the Nebula and Stoker awards for Best Novel. While I know awards are mostly meaningless,1 I’m always pleased when something genuinely good wins one.]

Have I been calling2 Stephen Graham Jones’s novel The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, The Buffalo Hunter? Yes. Will I most likely always call it that? Probably. Does it at all affect the quality of the novel? Fuck, no. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a fine—no, magnificent—example of horror fiction.

The novel opens with a framing narrative. Not my favourite literary device, but like everything about The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, the execution here is first class. The year is 2012, and Etsy Beaucarne (“single, white, forty-two”) is digitally sent a century-old journal written by her ancestor, Arthur Beaucarne, a Lutheran pastor. The journal was discovered by a day worker stuck in the wall of a parsonage. Etsy, struggling to reach professorhood, sees the collation and transcription of Arthur’s journal as a way to academic glory.3

Aside from the first eighteen and final fifty-six pages, Arthur’s journal makes up the bulk of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. And. My God. The story Arthur has to tell. Or, more precisely, the story Good Stab (AKA The Fullblood AKA Takes-No-Scalps) has to tell. Most of Arthur’s journal is his transcription of Good Stab’s confession. Except, as we’re going to discover, this is no ordinary Blackfeet man and no ordinary confession.

I’m going to leave things there. One of the joys of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter isn’t so much the plot twists, but the way Jones paces the novel. Deliberate at first, we’re given the opportunity, like Beaucarne, to become accustomed to the rhythm of Good Stab’s voice, which pays little heed to European naming conventions:

The next time the white scabs came for the Pikuni was the same winter the soldiers shot our elders and children sick in their lodges, but I wasn’t in Heavy Runner’s camp on the Bear River that morning, and I wasn’t in Mountain Chief’s camp either, which is who the soldiers were looking for. I was up in the Backbone of the World, dragging an iron cage to Ninastako, the Great Chief, Chief Mountain, which is so high that I still look for it from all the way down here.

That iron cage is important, and once it’s opened, what was deliberate and measured shifts into a different register, one steeped in violence and gore. There are passages in this novel that even I, a splatterpunk fiend of days gone by, found confronting. Jones’s genius is that, upsetting as these scenes are, I never considered putting the novel down. Not because I have a thick skin for horror,4 but because the gore is justified. This novel would be a hollow thing without it. The violence brings into focus America’s systematic and brutal cleansing and relocation of the country’s Indigenous people.

It’s a violence that transforms Good Stab literally, figuratively, and spiritually into a monster. We want to feel sympathy for Good Stab’s plight, but Jones won’t let us off that easy. The violence Good Stab inflicts on the guilty and the innocent speaks to a land corrupted by European and American settlement. Beaucarne, to be clear, isn’t passive in all this. His soul is as tainted and corrupted by America’s ethnic cleansing of the Native population. No one wins.

This is an incredibly good novel. One that shows what horror fiction is capable of.

Subscribe now

The opening sentence of Kenan Orhan’s The Renovation is so self-contained, so intriguing, so deadpan funny, that it would be criminal if I didn’t quote it:

I don’t know by what accident the builders had managed it, but instead of a remodeled bathroom attached to my bedroom, they had installed a prison cell.

It’s all well and good to start with a cracking first sentence, but, I hear you ask, does the rest of The Renovation deliver on that opener? The answer to that question is… not straightforward. While the first section of The Renovation is surreal and funny, as Dilara tries to get to the bottom of how and why the builders turned her bathroom into a cell,1 past the first thirty pages the story grows ever darker in tone. In short, if you’re expecting a wry satire about house renovations, this is not the novel for you.

To be fair, the hints (more than hints, really) are present from the outset. Dilara, along with her husband and father, is a Turkish exile living in Salerno, Italy. The prison cell is no ordinary cell, but one of the 11,000 and counting that make up Turkey’s notorious Silivri Prison (AKA Marmara Penitentiaries).2 Dilara is so incensed with the renovation gone wrong that, when she encounters a guard on the other side of her cell, she barely registers the name of the prison.

Dilara doesn’t tell her husband, once an accountant, now an academic, or her father, once a renowned academic, now suffering from dementia, about the bathroom-cum-prison cell. But there’s only so long you can hide an en-suite, and when her husband finds out, he does a runner, leaving Dilara, who hasn’t yet found work, with few resources and an ailing father.

Other days still there was nothing exceptional about [my father’s] physical health, but sitting in his chair he would stare for extended periods without moving or blinking, and I could see something begin to churn beneath his face. I could see a man who had lost a word. Then another and another and another. Even before we left Istanbul, my father spoke fewer than half the sentences he used to, couldn’t remember such easy words as onion, house key, bedsheet.

Like you, I’m aware that Erdoğan’s authoritarian regime is one of the most oppressive in the world, right up alongside Russia and North Korea. What I’d forgotten (or never knew) was that Erdoğan really cracked down after surviving a military coup in 2016.3 But even if you’re cognisant of the coup and Erdoğan’s subsequent crackdown on secular institutions and academics like Dilara’s father, who were labelled terrorists, insurgents, enemies of the state, the facts read differently when reduced to the personal, and that’s what Orhan achieves so effectively.

The question I tussled with was: do we need the prison? Do we need a metaphor for Dilara’s pain, given what she has experienced and is still experiencing—escaping Turkey, her father slowly, horribly fading away, her inability to find work, and her absent husband? Isn’t all that already awful enough?4 But, of course, the prison isn’t symbolic of Dilara’s struggles. If anything, it’s an escape. The quiet space she can enter to get away from her dying father and an emptying bank account. She even furnishes the cell with knick-knacks and books. I’d say a home away from home, but in a very real sense this cell is Dilara’s home. It’s a reminder of everything she loved about Turkey, but also everything she has lost—a place she can never escape, no matter how far she runs. So, yes, The Renovation wouldn’t be the novel it is, wouldn’t be as powerful and sobering, without the surrealism of that cracking opening line and everything it entails.

Subscribe now

Saba Sams’s luridly titled Gunk is another read inspired by Dwight Garner.1 This one he liked.2 So did I.

Gunk follows Jules, who manages, with her ex-husband, the grimiest of grimy “student” nightclubs in Brighton. The title is both a reference to the state of the club3 and the name of the place. Yes. It’s called Gunk. As Jules notes, it’s a place defined by its “grottiness”.

But wait. Let’s rewind.

The novel starts with Jules feeding a baby a syringe of colostrum. We quickly learn that Jules has always wanted to have a child. Dwight Garner calls Jules’s desire to be a mother a radical move. “Can punks be homebodies?” he asks. (Not sure I’d call Jules a punk. Nim on the other hand... but we will get to her).

Dwight also seems to be assuming that young women today don’t want to have children. If you base that view solely on contemporary literature, there’s some merit in it. But then contemporary literature also fails to capture the anxieties, challenges and prejudices faced by the working class. That’s not an issue with Gunk. Jules can be ambiguous, even unreliable, especially on the question of relationships, but she’s not opaque about her yearning for a baby. Jules also has an unvarnished attitude toward working long hours in far-from-ideal conditions to make ends meet. Made all the worse by her ex-husband, who enjoys fucking the clientele.

Actually, the portrayal of Leo (Jules’s ex) is one of the more fascinating aspects of Gunk. Jules and he get together in a rush, shagging in Gunk’s disabled toilets (as you do). Leo is charismatic. He’s also sensitive and easily hurt, like a child. And much like a child, he has zero self-control—in his case, when it comes to women. Yet we (or at least I) don’t hate Leo. It’s because Jules doesn’t hate Leo. She feels sorry for him and loves him despite his flaws (while also being thankful she’s not married to him).

Back to the plot. The baby is Nim’s. Nim is the queer bartender who works at Gunk. She’s the novel’s I-don’t-give-a-fuck punk. The question of her pregnancy (how it came about) is something you can discover in your own time, but we get a strong vibe that Jules and Nim—who might once have been close—are now on the outs. Jules wants to say sorry, to apologise for wrongs we, the reader, are not yet aware she’s committed. But Nim has abruptly left the hospital, leaving her newborn with Jules.

At chapter’s end, Sams rewinds and takes us back to the beginning. Yep, similar to Sisters in Yellow, Gunk starts at the end. The story is so involving, and Jules, Leo and Nim are such convincing characters, that by the time I came back full circle, I’d forgotten this is where we began, with Jules feeding Nim’s baby. (And it’s not like I read Gunk over a week. It’s short. I devoured it in a day and a half.) About two-thirds of the way through, we start to question Jules’s motivation, especially in relation to Nim. What is she to Jules?

Gunk is riddled with sadness, doubt and guilt. But it also has these gorgeous, intimate, tender moments. If anything, that’s what’s radical about it. Not that Jules wants a baby, but that a book named Gunk, set in a grotty nightclub, seems totally devoid of cynicism.

Subscribe now