November 07 2025, 15:29
November mood
I’m between a couple of unusual (for me) adventures and recovering from a cold. We flew to Lisbon for three nights with our daughter—she’s into marine conservation, and the Oceanário de Lisboa is the second-biggest aquarium in the world. It’s a beautiful city. I was worried about the hills, but doing the strength work all summer served me well. On the flight out I must have picked up a virus, because within hours of getting home my throat started to hurt. It wasn’t Covid, but I haven’t had a cold in over a year so I was comically grumpy about it.
Next week is the Abertoir Film Festival, a.k.a., THE INTERNATIONAL HORROR FESTIVAL OF WALES, in Aberystwyth. This will be my first time at a horror film festival, and my work-in-progress novel has one, so it’s both for pleasure and research. The mix of the old and the new is particularly exciting. They’re showing BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, EYES WITHOUT A FACE, THE GHOST, a documentary on the making of Michael Mann’s THE KEEP, an in-person show with Garth Marenghi on the opening night, talks on the Gothic in video games, a pub quiz, famous faces from the seventies... I’m vibrating thinking about it.
Until leaving for Lisbon, all my creative projects were ticking along well. Writing, guitar, reading, strength. No stress, just doing a bit each day. The local swimming pool closed because a pump failed, so I haven’t swum since September. That’s a bit of a blow. I’m sure my muscles will remember what to do when the time comes.
That‘s where I’m at. No dramas. I’m trying to create a stronger connection with my unconscious flow. My Bluesky account feels pretty dry and dull. If I’m worried at all, it’s that I’m too busy in the shallows and not going deep enough. No dreams, either. Well, unconscious, I’m open to a dream if you’ve got one for me.
October 21 2025, 17:42
Moderation
Author: Elaine Castillo
First published: 2025
~ 105,000 words. Third person limited. Girlie Delmundo.
It’s been a while since I last posted a review. I’m a fast reader, but I tend to read in short bursts, perhaps twenty minutes once or twice a day. The blurb and jacket description (and opening third, tbf) make you think it’s a techno thriller, but it pivots around the halfway point into clear literary romance territory, which I wasn’t expecting.
Girlie Delmundo is a content moderator specialising in taking down child abuse videos for a global social media company . She seems completely disassociated from any feelings this brings up for her, and her excellence in the role brings her to the attention of new bosses. She’s headhunted into a role moderating a virtual reality world called Playground. Her new manager is William, a man as distant and awkward socially as she is, who it turns out is one of the few remaining initial employees of the company that built Playground, and he has a surprising agenda.
In the opening chapters, there are deliberately graphic descriptions of the awful videos content moderators have to assess, and it’s implied that something from Girlie’s past allows her to be able to do the job she does. There are also detailed descriptions of Filipino family dynamics, the American class system, the experiences of the Filipino diaspora in California and Las Vegas, the effects of capitalism on... everything. Girlie’s family becomes a vital part of the story.
The technology created to give access to Playground is described evocatively and realistically. One of the themes is how VR technology can be used to create both healing and traumatic experiences (and everything in between), but it’s easy to get confused about what is real when you are wearing a full bodysuit that simulates the sensations of reality. There is also the question of what is being done with all the data. Capitalism demands profit, and it treats data as a resource to be mined.
There is a promise of darkness in the first half of the book that doesn’t ultimately get fulfilled. It’s a story about a woman breaking down the emotional barriers she’s created inside herself and falling in love. The descriptions and depth of thought that’s gone into the world are amazing. Writing a novel is another way to create a world to lose yourself in. There’s a lot of different things happening in this book, and it's not wholly successful for my taste, but there's so much to admire.
October 06 2025, 20:35
The Men
Author: Sandra Newman
First published: 2022
~70,000 words. 15 chapters. First person, Jane Pearson. Also, third person, other characters.
On a camping trip in the North Californian mountains with her husband and son, Jane Pearson experiences "an intense nothing" and is suddenly alone. Across the world, all males have simultaneously disappeared—men, children and babies. This conceit launches us into an exploration of how the world might feel for women without men around, and the potential female utopia that could be created.
The men's shadow is still present in snippets of video that start appearing online. The men are faceless and altered, existing like zombies in a hellish world inhabited by strange creatures within an ever-shifting desolate landscape. Some women become addicted to watching, and those who do tend to see the loved ones they've lost on their screens.
Tying the story together is our protagonist, Jane, and her ex-lover, Evangelyne, who bonded on a college campus when both were infamous for different reasons. Jane was in a devastatingly abusive relationship with her ballet teacher, Alain, who manipulates the underage Jane into having sex with ever-younger boys, leaving her with a reputation as a paedophile. Evangelyne is escaping her own traumatic teenage relationship with a girl whose psychosis leaks into the story of the men's disappearance.
The prose is terrific. Sandra Newman has a wonderful way of describing her uncanny world. The level of detail is intimidating. She invents an entire social movement around commensalism, a biological term for one organism benefiting from another without affecting it for better or worse, while diving deep into the fraught waters of racism, sexism and police brutality, all while telling a love story.
The women are almost all shown as better off without the men in their lives. Both Jane and Evangelyne have life experiences that could be inferred as the cause of the men's disappearance, and this is part of the book's mysterious dance.
September 22 2025, 20:24
Universality
Author: Natasha Brown
First published: 2025
~30,000 words, featuring several characters at various levels of the media industry.
The novel is in four acts, each from different points of view. It opens with a long magazine article about a young man, Jake, who had disappeared after using a solid gold bar to knock out a squatter on a deserted Yorkshire farm. In the second act we meet author of the article, Hannah, at a dinner party she’s organised. Then we switch to much maligned banker Richard who owned the gold bar (and the empty farm the squatters were on), before we finally meet vitriolic newspaper columnist Lenny at a literary festival to promote her new book about "Woke Capitalism".
After the opening article, each successive section casts new light on what has come before. The tone of Hannah’s article is well struck—not too professional, but engaging and showing some personality. It’s a surprise to meet her at her dinner party and see how abject she feels as a struggling writer in the face of her richer middle class peers. Her old friends are awful, and old flame Martin, is particularly odious, using her to get information he needs for a prestigious interview.
The story comes at class in the British media industry from many directions. Hannah is a freelance writer, and has no connections, no rich parents, no money to fall back on, and to her credit takes a job as a shop assistant to pay the bills instead of leaving London altogether. Her article makes a brief splash, but she is left little better off in career terms afterwards. Her old boyfriend, Martin, is more vicious with his ambition, and has connections. Richard, the banker whose farm the squatters were on, is rich, but has a complicated relationship with family and money and is deeply unhappy. And anti-hero Lenny, the nihilistic provocateur, pulling the strings to get Hannah’s article published, knows how to play the media game, but is continually disrespected and underestimated because of her populist rhetoric.
Hannah’s piece appears in a magazine called Alazon, which is also a type of stock character in ancient Greek plays, an imposter who thinks themselves greater than they are. All of the characters in the story have that quality. Pegasus (!), the charismatic leader of the commune on the farm, uses the term universality to mean a society where everyone is equal. Lenny uses the term universality as similar to relatability; she wants to connect to the largest possible audience without being held to unnecessary and awkward details. Language is flexible. Language is powerful.
Lenny's caustic voice is one of the wonders of the book, and her finale, tearing apart the odious Martin, is a wonder to behold. She's spreading lies and sowing confusion, but it's hard not to cheer her on, because Martin’s slipperiness is somehow worse.
September 13 2025, 14:46
A Spy in the House of Love
Author: Anaïs Nin
First published: 1954
~ 35,000 words. Third person limited/omniscient, mostly with Sabina.
Sabina is in a long-term relationship with Alan, a father figure, while having affairs with other men. She is an actress and, when she disappears for days and weeks at a time, she tells Alan it is to perform in plays across the country, whereas actually she is staying alone in the city to hook up with new people. On her return, she improvises for Alan elaborate lies about her time away, but this takes its toll on her mental health.
At the opening, Sabina wakes in a hotel bedroom, tense and anxious, looking for danger, then gradually feeling better as she applies her makeup and chooses her clothes, completing her costume with a cape that she feels gives her “some dash, some audacity, some swagger of freedom denied to woman”. It’s her battle dress in her lifelong fight to feel whole instead of fragmented. This is the main theme of the novel.
In the opening pages, we see Sabina through the eyes of ‘the lie detector’, who by the end we realise is Sabina’s internalised guilt. Alan gives her the stability she needs, but he doesn’t see the whole of her, and she lies to him so that she can look for missing parts of herself in other men. Whether she is really an actress or not, she is a gifted chameleon, changing with each man, responding to what they need from her. But unlike in a play, she struggles to shake off these relationship parts from her elusive underlying personality.
The prose is thick with lyrical details about feelings, needs and desires, philosophical in places, building to a conversation in a nightclub with an artist, Jay, who perhaps captures closest the reader’s view of Sabina in all her messy glory. The arrival of a character called Djuna Barnes, who Anaïs Nin admired in real life but was never friends with, gives Sabina access to some insight and peace.
September 06 2025, 13:46
we had to remove this post
Author: Hanna Bervoets
First published: 2022
~25,000 words. Six chapters/acts. First person, Kayleigh, as a letter to Mr Stitic, a lawyer.
Kayleigh has received several emails from Mr Stitic, a lawyer at a firm bringing a civil action against Hexa, the company Kayleigh used to work for. She was in a team that moderated social media posts, taking them off the site if they broke the rules. The rules are detailed and specific, and while the staff have aggressive targets to meet each day, they are also expected to be accurate in their assessments.
Her team is a group of misfits, like any team, but bound by the horrors they are obliged to sit through for their job. They try to abstract themselves from the images their minds are assaulted with through a mixture of denial, camaraderie, substance abuse, and an almost religious respect for "the rules". We are given brief sketches of the awful things people do (and want to share!) through examples of the assessments, but the story is really about Kayleigh's patterns in toxic romantic relationships with other women.
The toxicity of the job brings out a slowly increasing extremism in everyone, and the reader begins to wonder how much to trust Kayleigh's account of things. The finale involves a question about violence and consent. The story falls apart in the final third because the conversations about the extreme views being represented are clunky and obvious, and the relationship Kayleigh is in feels thin. There isn't much depth to it all. But it was compelling enough for me to finish it in a couple of days.
August 30 2025, 11:25
The Sleepwalkers
Author: Scarlett Thomas
First published: 2024
~ 80,000 words. Letters, transcriptions, lists (epistolary!). Evelyn and Richard.
A newly married couple, Evelyn and Richard, are gifted a honeymoon by the groom’s mother at Villa Rosa, an exclusive hotel on a Greek island. We know this because Evelyn tells us in a letter she has written to Richard, which takes up the first third of the novel. The flamboyance and anger in her voice is both attractive and off-putting, and not knowing the structure, I almost put the book down. Fortunately, it’s cleverer than that, and we get a similarly long letter from Richard, as well as short notes from other characters, lists of photographs, and so on. We come to realise the novel is a collection of documents that is also referenced in the story.
It’s a dark comedy, but the themes were darker than I expected, including incest, rape and human trafficking, wrapped in a mystery told in queasily light voices. The thriller-ish final act tying a variety of loose ends (but not all) was quite jarring and uninvolving. It could be I am especially sensitive to this sort of ending because it’s something I tend to do and don’t like in my own stories. It highlights how hard it is to strike a tonal balance that works.
There’s lots to admire. The voices of Evelyn, Richard and the handful of supporting characters are distinct and believable. I’m curious if Thomas knew the whole story before she started writing it, because the way she drops details in about the complex plot is expert. Her descriptions of the island, the hotel and its inhabitants are great.
There’s a fun smuttiness in Evelyn's manner, but there’s nothing funny about the themes. These are the characters voices, and they are privileged, a bit disgusting, very unlucky, abused themselves, and so on, so who am I to say that isn’t how it might be for them? I don’t have to like them. They are who they are. But the story is highlighting the plight of trafficked people, and I wonder if my queasiness is because the upper middle class mystery, as dark as it is, perhaps isn't strong enough to carry the weight of the themes.
August 29 2025, 20:23
Summer’s end
I’ve started watching the Met Office YouTube channel, perhaps because I know autumn is coming and I want to prepare for it, or it could be because the more unpredictable weather represents my return to work, big new projects, my daughter starting A-levels, and a new phase in my life.
The summer has been a fascinating experiment in broadening my creative horizons. I don’t want to cede the ground I’ve won to more mundane 9-to-5 pressures. It might be unwise, it might not, but I’m going to try to continue with the writing, reading, guitar practice and swimming lessons in September. I’m not going to take on my usual film challenge in October, which I would be preparing for now. This is a concession.
Amie McNee’s book, We Need Your Art, was a valuable jolt of reason and a reminder that procrastination is fear beneath the surface, and while there have been many valid reasons not to prioritise writing over the last few years, none of them are in play now. She proposes restarting the habit of creating every day by setting the bar so low that it would be embarrassing not to accomplish it. For me, that’s 100 words a day, and I write more, but 100 words is my target. It’s working. I’ve gone back to the beginning of the novel and I’m making it into a functional first draft. In parallel, I’m reading novels (short ones, to keep me motivated) for the fun of it, but also to research structure and voice.
Writing regularly again is a big deal. It’s ironic that doing more diverse projects, not fewer, was the key to unlocking the writing. Guitar and piano use a different part of my brain. Understanding my biology to improve my hip pain is a practical science. Swimming is a physical skill. I think learning fresh skills reminded my of my abilities and potency. I’m a learner by nature. Always have been.
August 27 2025, 20:05
Matt and Mara
Director: Kazik Radwanski
Release year: 2024
Mara, a married creative writing professor, is surprised when Matt, a very close friend from her past that she no longer hears from, shows up at one of her lectures. They pick up their relationship while Matt is in town, leading to Matt driving Mara to a literary conference where the nature of their relationship is called into question.
This is an interesting counterpoint to In the Mood for Love where the almost-lovers strike out on different paths. Here, Mara and Matt are coming back together. Mara is married with a child, and Matt is perpetually single. Mara clearly loves her musician husband, but she doesn’t like music, and Matt offers conversation about literature and a playfulness with language that she can’t get in her marriage.
Mara has an idea for a collection of poems about a woman unconsciously acting out desires she’s unaware of, but is struggling to begin. Matt seems to be a successful and known novelist who is deliberately controversial to attract his audience. He’s extroverted, brash, slightly obnoxious, whereas Mara is unsure, introvert, and shy. Their opposite energies seem to be the source of their joy in each other’s company, and Matt is a catalyst to Mara’s hidden desires.
The camera is always close to both characters’ faces which allows us to follow every movement of an eyebrow and each mouth twitch as they hang out with each other in routine parts of their day. It isn’t clear if they were lovers in the past, or why they drifted apart, but for a brief time we observe them come alive in each other's company.
August 25 2025, 18:38
In the Mood for Love
Director: Wong Kar-wai
Release year: 2000
In 1962 Hong Kong, two working couples, the Chans and the Chows, move in to neighbouring apartments in a house run by Mrs Suen. Both Mr Chow and Mrs Chan suspect their spouses are having an affair, and they begin their own relationship to work out what they should do next.
The opening act plays out through short scenes that drift together as time passes. We hear the voices, and see the backs of the heads, of the treacherous partners, but the camera cares about the wronged duo, who are luminous in every frame. The film is only ninety minutes long, and not a shot is wasted, with many like pieces of art in their own right.
Sometimes the strings will kick in, everything slows down, and either Mr Chow or Mrs Chan will glance at the other, or sadly smoke a cigarette, and we feel their longing in our bones. It’s a film about the loneliness of marriages that aren’t working. Mr Chow encourages Mrs Chan to help him write his serial, and the pair start a fruitful creative partnership in a rented room that’s spiced with romantic love, but the housekeeper, Mrs Suen, tightens the clamp of social norms on the burgeoning couple.
It’s a devastating film in the best way. I saw this in a cinema off Leicester Square when I moved to London in 2000, but I was too young to understand the depth of feeling in what was being shown on screen. I didn’t remember the final scenes in Cambodia at all, and I didn’t know Maggie Cheung played the heroine until the opening credits, which was a lovely unexpected link back to Irma Vep. Both Cheung and Tony Leung are sensational. This is one of my favourite discoveries of the year so far.