Book posts
These are my book notes. Nothing fancy. They’re not really reviews, more like thoughts a day or two later, and I try and write them before I pick up another book. Writing something quickly gives me a snapshot to look back on, and it seals the experience more firmly in my brain.
July 31 2026, 19:02
The Hotel
In the opening chapter, a narrator lays out everything that is known about a haunted hotel. From there, we hear voices speak of their experiences, from a woman labelled a witch and drowned in a pond, to a builder who hears voices at night... [more...]
May 24 2026, 21:43
Authority
A new director of the Southern Reach, calling himself Control, arrives at the border of Area X tasked with investigating what happened to the twelfth expedition. The staff are wary, bordering on hostile... [more...]
May 09 2026, 13:28
She Who Remains
It starts confusingly with word definitions, quotes, and a rush of thoughts about the death of a father. Bekija is the daughter of Murash who has been shot in the head. They live in the “Accursed Mountains” somewhere in Albania with... [more...]
April 30 2026, 20:30
The Palm House
Laura Miller has been friends with Edmund Putnam since university, and Putnam has worked for the same magazine, Sequence, most of his working life. A new editor arrives and upsets the established dynamics. [more...]
April 25 2026, 10:25
A Start in Life
I first heard about Anita Brookner as a literary personality through Andy Miller's love of her on the Backlisted podcast, even though I had read Hotel du Lac many years before. Until then, she was a name, but no more than that. [more...]
April 13 2026, 14:37
Diary of an Oxygen Thief
The question of whether it is fiction, autofiction, or autobiography colours the experience of reading this book from the start. The opening line is, 'I liked hurting girls'. The author is anonymous. And for the next fifteen pages... [more...]
April 05 2026, 15:13
Annihilation
I don’t reread books in general, just as I don’t rewatch films. It’s not an impulse I have. I'm not a comfort reader. There are far too many things in the world that I’m yet to read or watch, and the older I get the more I feel that time is speeding up... [more...]
March 15 2026, 18:04
The King in Yellow
Five short stories. A book in the Penguin Weird Fiction collection. The original has ten stories, so I’m guessing an editor at Penguin chose the “most weird”. The King in Yellow is also the name of a book referenced... [more...]
February 21 2026, 17:26
HORRORSTÖR
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. [more...]
February 13 2026, 21:47
Carmilla
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. [more...]
February 09 2026, 20:17
Drive
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... [more...]
January 27 2026, 22:30
The Expansion Project
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... [more...]
January 13 2026, 21:01
Wuthering Heights
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... [more...]
December 30 2025, 16:54
Books of Blood, Vol IV
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... [more...]
December 14 2025, 10:59
Lucio’s Confession
I bought this while visiting 'the oldest bookshop in the world', Livraria Bertrand in the Chiado district of Lisbon, at which the staff stamp the inside cover in a cute proof that it was bought there. [more...]
November 30 2025, 15:12
Cursed Bunny
There’s a transition that happens if you read the stories in order. It starts with what feels like horrific folk tales, where women are fighting their bodies, families and the cultural norms of South Korea. [more...]
October 21 2025, 17:42
Moderation
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. [more...]
October 06 2025, 20:35
The Men
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. [more...]
September 22 2025, 20:24
Universality
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. [more...]
September 13 2025, 14:46
A Spy in the House of Love
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... [more...]
September 06 2025, 13:46
we had to remove this post
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. [more...]
August 30 2025, 11:25
The Sleepwalkers
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. [more...]