February 21 2026, 17:26
HORRORSTÖR
Author: Grady Hendrix
First published: 2014
Sucked into a purchase by the ingenious cover design and the way it’s laid out like an IKEA catalogue, even though I’ve tried two other Grady Hendrix novels and not liked either of them, I was hopeful this one would be different. Tonally, his voice is the same, which is light, snarky and unafraid of a joke, but in HORRORSTÖR I’m more forgiving of it. I think it’s because of his likeable/relatable protagonist, Amy, and his heartfelt criticism of corporate consumer culture.
Amy works at ORSK, an American version of IKEA, but she isn’t earning enough money to pay her way in the world. She thinks her officious manager, Basil, is looking to fire her, but one night he asks her, along with older co-worker Anne-Marie, to stay overnight to catch someone who is making a mess of the store. Two other co-workers, Matt and Trinity, sneak in with camera equipment because they think the store is haunted. They discover a sixth person, Alan, who is homeless and sleeps there, and think they’ve found the culprit, but this ORSK outlet was built on the same location as the destroyed Cuyahoga Panopticon, a controversial nineteenth century prison that tortured its inmates to death in the name of salvation.
The warden of the prison, Josiah Worth, built a basement with an array of truly awful torture devices, and when his “penitents” surface at night, the past and present merge into a disorientating new reality. Each chapter is opened with an illustration of a piece of ORSK furniture, and by the time the torture starts, the chairs and beds match the gruesome designs of the Warden who thinks working (to death) is the only way to cleanse the soul.
It’s cleverly done, and there are plenty of amusing comparisons with modern working conditions spelled out, but I don’t think I’ll ever be a fan of Hendrix’s voice, even if I thought HORRORSTÖR was pretty good. The torture descriptions are nasty. Sometimes the scenes of characters moving through the store at night feel like the Silent Hill video game. The true horror seems to the temptation Amy feels to give in to the cult of corporate work and become a zombie worker. I think most people can relate to that.
February 13 2026, 21:47
Carmilla
Author: Sheridan Le Fanu
First published: 1871/1872
The book has a beautiful, striking cover with a red fore-edge, so in the bookshop I was already intrigued, but then I read the blurb claiming this vampire story pre-dated Dracula by twenty-six years, and I was sold. It’s short, originally serialised in a magazine, around 35,000 words. It’s written as a first person account by a woman named Laura which is found by a doctor with a colleague’s note attached. Her symptoms are thought to be supernatural.
Laura and her widower father live with their servants in a remote castle deep in a forest. One day a carriage passes with a mother and daughter aboard. Laura is lonely, and the mother asks if her daughter, Carmilla, can stay with them for a few months while she performs a vitally important errand. Laura and Carmilla strike up a strong bond, but villagers in the surrounding areas begin to die from a new disease, and soon Laura is suffering from a more drawn out version of a similar malaise.
It has fairy tale elements to it. In fact, it’s pretty Gothic. They live in a castle, everything feels ominous, and emotions are heightened. Laura is torn between love and disgust over Carmilla’s intense feelings for her. The lesbian vampires that emerge in the sixties Hammer films could have their roots here. Laura doesn’t seem to be sexually attracted to Carmilla, but the intimacy is used by Carmilla to create her vampiric bond.
Laura has a dream as a child of a creature in her room that bites her breast, and when Carmilla arrives Laura recognises her from the dream. Towards the end of the story we discover the vampire family’s home is in the same forest, so the ever-young Carmilla probably preyed on Laura twelve years before, although that isn’t explicitly said. Like F.W. Murnau's film Nosferatu (1922), the vampires in Carmilla spread death quickly and widely, like bubonic plague. A devilish creature indeed.
February 09 2026, 20:17
Drive
Author: James Sallis
First published: 2005
A short novel, around 45,000 words. We follow the literally-named Driver, a stuntman starting a career in Hollywood who instead chose a life as the getaway driver for armed robbers. The story jumps artfully around Driver’s whole life, concentrating on a job that goes wrong and the fallout from it, but also spending lots of time in the minutiae of life in Los Angeles in what seems like the eighties. It’s a timeless setting. The only clues are the lack of mobile phones, the many film references and the model years of cars Driver steals for work.
This 2006 novel is an expansion of a short story Sallis wrote in 2002, and my copy of the novel has Ryan Gosling from the 2011 film adaptation on the front—so that’s three versions, followed by a sequel Sallis wrote in 2012, Driven. He held on to this character for a decade or more, even though there is very little to know about him from the page. That’s interesting. Driver is a kid with a rough upbringing fleeing to Los Angeles to try and make a life doing the only thing he’s good at. He’s a character that could easily be a cliché, but instead holds the reader’s attention through the voice Sallis uses to tell the story.
The point of view switches when necessary for the plot, and that keeps things interesting. We briefly see the world through the eyes of underground medic Doc, incompetent mafioso Nino, and the more accomplished killer Bernie Rose. There are friendlier characters with names like Standard, Manny and Shannon.
Manny is a rich screenwriter living in a rundown house who takes Driver out for expensive meals to talk literature. I wonder if he’s a proxy for Sallis himself. Driver eats a lot of meals which are described in great detail. These men love to eat well in their otherwise grotty lives. The sentences and characters are noir to their bones. A refreshing read.
January 31 2026, 20:17
Winter refresh
I’m juggling projects and I’m enjoying myself. Over the Christmas break I decided to give in to my nature and do what I want when I want (creatively speaking). I can only do this when I’m relaxed. In the past, trying to live this way, the snake of anxiety always reared its head.
Not this January. Without wanting to tempt fate, something seems to have changed inside me for the better. I want to make things, and I want them to be good, but I’ve stopped worrying about their impact on the world.
I’m working on the novel. I’m still having guitar lessons, and I’ve been challenged to write a song. I’m going to the cinema to see new films, finding new music to listen to, reading new books. I’m cooking new meals. I’m taking photographs when I’m out and about. It’s a new year, I’m not a new me, but I do have a fresh mindset that’s sticking.
It’s always seemed to me that my creative impulses were part of a cohesive whole—an identity that I couldn’t easily label but felt real. I’m experimenting with that identity. No judgement or expectation.
I’m doing what I can to keep my timeline aligned with my true interests. Not bullshit politics or tragedies thousands of miles away I can do nothing about. If I can do something, I will, but I’m refusing the attention black holes.
I’ve stepped back from reading Bluesky and I’m avoiding the news as much as I can. I post a couple of times a day and read the people on my Bluesky ‘good list’. I have a Bluesky alt that follows some small art, horror and ‘demure erotica’ accounts (yes, I made that term up, but it should exist).
Online can be light and fun. My life is lighter and more fun. I’m far more concerned about having a creative life than being seen to be successful in all the usual ways. I’m excited for February.
January 27 2026, 22:30
The Expansion Project
Author: Ben Pester
First published: 2025
Tom Crowley, first person, then others, ~60,000 words.
There are pleasures in work, but also drudgery, especially in larger organisations where there’s a tremendous amount of bullshit to navigate. Tom Crowley is a workaholic who struggles to connect with his children and feels overwhelmed by guilt at his inadequacy in all areas of his life. He takes his young daughter, Hen, to work (for Take Your Daughter to Work Day) and discovers that nobody else saw that email, so there are no other children for her to play with. Then she goes missing.
Tom works at Capmeadow Business Park as a copywriter. At the start of the story, Capmeadow seems concrete enough, expanding with new buildings and projects, but there is a mysterious mist, and people who work at Capmeadow are often confused and anxious about things they can’t quite put their finger on. Their minds play tricks on them, and the longer they work there, and as Capmeadow grows, the expansion becomes more abstract, surreal and upsetting.
An archivist interjects the narrative with notes about the text, which are recorded as part of interviews with the characters over a long period of time. Capmeadow seems to be an organic, living thing, perhaps alien, or a virtual reality, or something else, and anyone who’s worked there seems to be pulled into its growing madness.
Tom Crowley is the closest to a main character we have, continually showing up in the archivist’s records searching for his lost daughter. For him, work is so entwined in his daily life, he succumbs easily to Capmeadow’s spell and work becomes his life. He wanders Capmeadow’s maze of rooms, corridors, gardens, Kanban boards, online calls and chatrooms as if they were all as real as each other.
It’s a tale of how work identity can become our only identity, working on meaningless tasks for empty projects, until we dissolve into a now-sentient capitalist organism. Disturbing more than amusing, it's an impressive surreal dystopia that feels like a warning shot across my bow.
January 13 2026, 21:01
Wuthering Heights
Author: Emily Brontë
First published: 1850
Mr Lockwood, via Nelly Dean, first/second person, ~200,000 words.
I didn’t finish Wuthering Heights. I got about a third of the way through before I became stuck in the sludgy swamp of the prose and subject matter. I picked it because I saw a trailer for the upcoming Emerald Fennell adaptation in the cinema, and also it was my mother’s favourite book—I have a copy signed by her from childhood—so I gave it as much leeway as I could manage before the relentless misery and suffering snuffed my energy for it out.
The book is not at all the romantic story culture has made it seem like. The various adaptations play on doomed romance and star-crossed lover tropes that are just not in the novel. Heathcliff is violently abused and becomes monstrous. Cathy is a narcissist. As young stepbrother and stepsister, they are terrors around the house, rude to everyone and unpleasantly mischievous.
In the opening scenes, the hapless Lockwood goes to Wuthering Heights out of curiosity and is met with a dilapidated house where he is denied entry, mocked by owner Heathcliff, attacked by his dogs, refused a place to sleep when a snowstorm hits, and eventually given a chair in a haunted room. It's a relentless exercise in discomfort. Undetered, the nosey Lockwood encourages his landlady, Nelly Dean, who used to work at Wuthering heights, to tell the story of how Heathcliff came to be as he was. We learn Heathcliff was a rescued orphan, bullied by his jealous stepbrother, Hindley, and besotted with his kindred-spirited stepsister, Cathy.
The story turns on an incident where both children play a prank on a neighbouring house, home of children Edgar and Isabella Linton. Cathy is hurt and taken in for several weeks to the Linton household where she is taught the manners and fashions of a lady. Heathcliff is blamed disproportionately for the prank and is punished harshly, so when Cathy returns Heathcliff has become almost feral, and this schism in their relationship eventually becomes permanent.
Throughout his childhood, Heathcliff is brutalised and blamed for much that is not his fault, so it makes sense that he would want revenge. As the book went on, I began to realise that his behaviour was so abhorrent and sustained that there was going to be no redemption. Cathy’s behaviour was repellent in different ways. I kept getting confused with people’s names, jumps in time, genealogy, property law—it was a hard book to follow, and the events told were consistently unpleasant. It was beginning to make me feel miserable (and not in a good way!), and I began to avoid reading it.
So, I read the synopsis on Wikipedia, and seeing where it was going, decided to call it a day. I'm not sorry I missed out on the vengeful sadistic marital abuse. I’m glad I gave it a go. I certainly have a decent knowledge of the story and characters, so I’m marking it as read and moving on.
December 31 2025, 19:10
2025: Best films, books and music
I have never pretended to be cool, or to try and keep up with the latest this or that. But, astonishingly, I saw sixty-one films in the cinema in 2025, by far the most ever in my life. The Abertoir Horror Festival in November was a film highlight, and the habit of posting on Patreon notes on each novel I read helped me get more out of my reading experiences. I tried to watch TV (I really did), but nothing stuck (except one).
Favourite film: Black Bag
Favourite book: Fever Dream, by Samanta Schweblin
Favourite album: Moisturiser, Wet Leg
Favourite TV show: Murderbot (the only one I finished)
Favourite video game: PGA Tour Pro Golf (the only one I played, but I played it A LOT).
My TOP 9 cultural things of 2025, in order of preference:
Films of 2025
- Black Bag
- The Ballad of Wallis Island
- Complete Unknown
- The Phoenician Scheme
- The Shrouds
- My Old Ass
- A House of Dynamite
- One Battle After Another
- Jay Kelly
Film discoveries
- Phenomena
- The Old Dark House
- Caché
- Irma Vep
- Matt and Mara
- In the Mood for Love
- Velvet Buzzsaw
- Acidman
- Playtime
Books
- Fever Dream
- Picnic at Hanging Rock
- Moderation
- Businessmen as Lovers
- Fatale
- A Visit From the Goon Squad
- Gabriel’s Moon
- Lost in the Garden
- Success
Most listened-to albums
- Wet Leg, Moisturizer
- Kylie Minogue, Tension II
- HAIM, I quit
- Waxahatchee, Tigers Blood
- Charli xcx, Brat
- Stereophonics, Make ‘em Laugh, Make ‘em Cry, Make ‘em Wait
- Shanti Celeste, Romance
- Angus & Julia Stone, Cape Forester
- Dua Lipa, Radical Optimism
December 30 2025, 16:54
Books of Blood, Vol IV
Author: Clive Barker
First published: 1988
I’ve owned these stories in compendium form since I was a teenager in the late eighties, but only read a handful then, and I haven’t read any of them since. My memory is that, compared with Stephen King, and even James Herbert, the stories were too gritty and lacked heart. I can’t remember why I pulled the second volume (Books IV-VI) off the shelf now. Perhaps it was a podcast recently where someone read Rawhead Rex? I’m not sure.
It’s a dense edition, with 44 lines per page, and the stories are long, 30-40 pages on average, which makes them comfortably over 15,000 words each, bordering on novellas. That’s not something I’ve seen before. I wonder how he hoped to get them published, or if that was even a consideration. Books of Blood IV has five stories, but Down, Satan! is only a few pages and more like a modern short story in length, if not in content.
The opening story, The Body Politic, was unexpectedly dull, even if the concept of human hands having minds of their own was clever. It felt like an exercise, or an attempt at comedy, but I struggled with it and almost put the collection down. Luckily the next two stories were excellent, with better drawn characters and some decent stakes for them. (It’s good to understand why I don’t like something.) The Inhuman Condition follows a young man in with the wrong crowd who steals from a homeless man an enchanted string of knots. My favourite was Revelations, set in a Texas motel where a wife murdered her philandering husband thirty years before, now visited by a famous preacher and his put-upon wife. It showed a different side to Barker’s writing, more empathic, with female characters, and it was inspiring to see him find a radically different voice. The Age of Desire returns to the multi-character many-points-of-view style of the opening story, and a similar clever concept.
These stories have some DNA from The Twilight Zone, Quatermass/Nigel Kneale, mixed with black magic. I struggle with the concept-driven ones that don’t have an emotional heart. It’s just not my sort of story.
December 30 2025, 11:03
Velvet Buzzsaw
Director: Dan Gilroy
Release year: 2019
Ambitious art gallery receptionist Josephina has her hoped-for promotion taken away by hard-nosed gallery owner Rhodora Haze. One evening, she discovers the dead body of an artist living in the apartment above her, along with rooms full of brilliant paintings, which she learns the man wanted destroyed. She asks her ex-boyfriend, influential art critic Morf Vandewalt, to confirm her assessment of its quality, and this sets off a battle in the Los Angeles art world over who will profit from the dead artist’s legacy. But the paintings are cursed, and those who profit from them begin to die in gruesome art-related ways.
This is a story of greedy art world snobs getting their comeuppance. Abused as a child, disturbed artist Vetril Dease used his own blood in his paintings, and this seems to be part of the supernatural curse he’s put on them. His art poured out of him onto canvases, cardboard, scraps of paper, anything to hand, and analysis shows there is no discernible pattern to his technique, and no sketches to show ideas being developed. He is a true outsider artist making art to process trauma.
Josephina, played by a wonderful Zawe Ashton, is terrified of being stuck as a receptionist and desperate to rise through the ranks of the art world. Her ambition sets the story in motion, and at first it’s understandable why she would try and save the art works from destruction. The commercial galleries are soon battling to make as much money as possible from Dease’s work, which other artists recognise as both genius and ‘alive’ in some way.
Artists in the film are represented by the cynical, newly sober (and artist-blocked) Piers, played by John Malkovich, and Damrish, part of a collective representing a younger generation. Both men recognise the power of the work and are stimulated to step away from the allure of money and fame to concentrate on their art. They are spared from the curse. Those who make a living from amplifying the work for profit, including selfish art critic Morf, are killed one-by-one by art pieces.
Dease, in death, has the power to punish the greedy and selfish through all art, not just his own. People die via other artist’s work, graffiti, and even tattoos. Everyone making this film seems to be having fun. It’s so good.
December 29 2025, 15:07
2025: Life projects review
I can’t believe it’s been a year since my 2024 life projects review. There’s been less family drama, more culture, and some not-unexpected symbolic shifts. My focus in the first half of the year was physiotherapy and gradually strengthening the muscles around my hips. Then in the summer, things became more varied and interesting.
I’ve been less hung up on writing, and instead done a mix of other creative things—guitar lessons, learning to swim, travelling, reading more fiction, and so on. The Arvon week was challenging, and perhaps it highlighted that I wasn’t ready to go full-on at being a writer in 2025.
Projects in 2025 (chronological order):
- Arvon week-long writing course in Shropshire
- New bathrooms drama
- Mumbles/Gower weekend to see Welsh family
- Family in Vietnam, me at home
- 12 arthouse films in the summer, a.k.a. #ArthouseSummer2025
- Daughter started Sixth Form for A-Levels
- Stephen Hough & Viano Quartet with Guy at Queen Elizabeth Hall
- Lisbon long weekend
- Abertoir Horror Festival of Wales in Aberystwyth
- Swapped knackered old Polo for an electric car
- 12 horror films in December, a.k.a. #12FilmsofBlackXmas
- Logged 28 books on Storygraph
- Logged 132 films on Letterboxd
New skills and habits:
- Strength at the gym and stretching at home
- Swimming lessons
- Guitar lessons
- Posted to Patreon a review for every novel I read
- Meditated most days