Post-Weird by Calum Lister Matheson

American society seems to have fractured. Common touchpoints of authority have receded in recent decades and beliefs that were once taboo are now openly shared, from neo-Nazism to occultism to conspiracy thinking. In this book, Calum Lister Matheson goes beyond the fraying of contemporary American culture to ask how splinter communities form in our current media environment, what keeps them together, and what they build from the ruins of shared language.

This book is about how anti-rhetorical readings shape communities in the wake of the decline of symbolic efficiency. Its key argument is that the communities that arise to fill a perceived void in shared culture bear unexpected structural similarities that are evident in their styles of interpretation, or reading, and that, while not all of these communities are insidious, cultivating rhetorical attitudes as a means of both accepting and navigating ambiguity and uncertainty is an important condition for us to find ways to live together.

Every now and again I’ll be browsing Foyles with an hour to kill and I’ll find myself probing past the world history and science sections, past the politics and current affairs, where I find myself in the philosophy section. There I begin to wonder, nay hope, whether this is the year I finally get philosophy. I’ll read a half dozen book covers, Schopenhauer, Nietschze, Foucault, Deleuze. The ideas all sound so enticing, they scratch a deep part of my brain. Then I flick one cover open after another to take a bite and I’m met with dense, circular, indecipherable pages. Dejectedly I’ll put everything back where I found them and go look at the true crime shelf. Most recently I’ve been blaming this on long COVID, but the truth is I have never really been able to get my head round philosophy.

I say all this by means of apologising in a sense to Calum Lister Matheson. I don’t think this book is for me. I’m not sure whether he intended to write it for the benefit or enjoyment of people like me or not, whether he even has an audience in mind. If you’re out there Calum, I want you to know that I turned every page with good intentions. I really wanted to absorb whatever ideas you were throwing out of your brain and onto the page.

Post-Weird is a book about language, culture and rhetoric, drawing from theories of Jacques Lacan (a French contemporary of Freud) and Slavoj Zizek. The book focuses on four fringe groups that have rejected mainstream opinion and have adopted ‘alternative facts.’ Matheson sees this rejection of unity, and a pursuant confidence in nonsensical, problematic and harmful beliefs as a form of psychosis. If you listen to the critics, we are unmaking the world - not by flood, not by fire, but by shitpost. Four chapters of the book cover distinct groups that have rejected established normative values: Sandy Hook denialists, who believe that a horrific school shooting was the work of anti-gun crisis actors; Christian serpent handlers, a snake-handling sect that risk injury and death in their religious practice; Pro-Ana communities, online pro-anorexia communities who share techniques and beliefs about consuming literally nothing; and finally Reactionary Science including incels, white nationalists and transinvestigators that misuse scientific theory to promote hatred. Matheson explores how all groups reject complexity and ambiguity, creating their own novel belief system that can help the world and its rules feel simple (ie good vs evil morality), holding an absolute, unshakeable certainty of belief that draws parallel with psychosis, rejecting their own agency in the service of truth.

The ideas and principles of Post-Weird are excellent. The actual book itself in practice though was an absolute chore to get through. To re-iterate, I appreciate that this book probably isn’t for me, and if I knew one thing about philosophy I’d know it’s meant to be read with a highlighter pen and York Notes, and I should go read a Hauntology book or some berk’s Substack about vaping DMT. I would respectfully push back on this self-recrimination though to say I wanted to get into Post-Weird, I just found the book to be fairly impenetrable.

An ambitious look at rhetoric and psychosis that explores how communities form when society collapses is how Rutgers University Press describes Post-Weird. I always get red flags from the word ‘ambitious.’ Some of my writing was described by my course tutors as ‘ambitious’ - those never got good marks. Ambitious is a kid who tries to build a rocketship from recycling. Ambitious is a person with pet hair allergies starting a dog grooming business. I have a problem with the publisher’s (and author’s for that matter) use of the word psychosis. The subjects of Post-Weird don’t carry psychosis in a clinical sense, but instead a philosophical/existential one. While Matheson describes various forms of psychosis through the lens of Jacques Lacan (a French contemporary of Freud), his reference to psychosis feel more symbolic, using it as a means to describe the certainty of belief that certain fringe groups hold, something he describes as ‘radical certainty.’ There’s not really any societal collapse featured in Post-Weird either, just a sad and lonely 21st century America.

There is irony in talking about language and rhetoric while inflicting sentences on the reader like - This work is performed at the level of the letter - the “material medium [support] that concrete discourse borrows from language, or at the place where something is transfigured from the code of langue and deployed in the parole of everyday communication. I’ve read that sentence, and hundreds more like it, countless times over the last two weeks in the hope of making sense of it, and I realise that there’s not really any point. Its a secret language that you either get, or don’t. Much like the speech patterns that he attributes to snake handlers and the pro-ana movement, Matheson is also employing language and rhetoric in a form of psychotic communication, just as subjective and coded as the communities he explores, different only in its presentation. Bafflingly, I think its easier to understand the central argument of a Sandy Hook denialist. Maybe I’ve been Inceptioned and Matheson has actually [de]programmed me without me even knowing it.

I’m also equally baffled that the same book that has headache-induing Word Jenga like The resonance of Science for these overlapping but disparate groups is a path to evaluating Lacan’s claim that signifiers are the real agents of discourse, while subjects are largely epiphenomenal functions of these basically inhuman operations of language. also makes reference to Rick and Morty to describe the limitations of scientific objectivity when it has been maladapted and co-opted by fringe communities. I’ve seen this sort of adoption used in the past by the likes of Zizek, who seems to think that if you randomly put 200 syllables into a sentence it will be readable because you mentioned Batman.

While I agree with the fundamentals of almost everything Matheson says in Post-Weird, I can’t really agree with the details of his arguments, in part because I can’t understand half of them. What’s quite frustrating is that so much of what he covers is important, and poses serious questions for the stability of western society and culture. Matheson’s arguments are comparable to the sort of sense-making word salad you get from the likes of Jordan Peterson. There’s a whole lot of words saying not a lot. Most of his points are covered in the introduction. Most of what I learned was about the fringe communities themselves, rather than Matheson’s arguments about whether or not these are examples of anti-rhetoric. Not much in the way of data, statistics or scientific rigour to back up anything that’s being said. It’s very much a vibes-based trip. 200 pages later, I’m still not sure what anti-rhetoric even means.

If you do know, it’s ok don’t worry about it hun x nvm I’m now reading a book about Raoul Moat xx

Post-Weird is available from Rutger University Press as a paperback or e-book from 11th November. Thanks to Rutger University Press via NetGalley for providing the opportunity to read this ahead of publication.

The Atlas of Hell by Nathan Ballingrud

The traveler is received at a local inn with courtesy and warmth. The fire in the hearth is raucous, the ovens hot. Conversations are robust. If the traveler does not have a coat, one is provided. If the traveler has no friend, strangers gather and offer their names. This is the condition of the Gloaming: warmth in the cold night, food and companionship in Hell’s rocky chain of mountains.

The wind which moves through the city emits from hundreds of fissures within the mountain, bringing peace and warmth to this isolate place. At the end of the mountain’s breath, however, there is a long pause, when the banners settle and the candle-flames stand straight.

The mountain begins to inhale, and Gloaming becomes a slaughterhouse.

The wind reverses course and moves inward, into the rock, at an increasing velocity. People are brought to their knees, staggering for shelter they will not find. The flesh is sloughed from their bodies in bloody sheets. Bones break. Some lurch about on snapped limbs. Buildings are ripped apart. The village becomes a bleeding wreckage and a fountain of wailing.

Within the Mountain That Breathes is a chamber housing a dozen captured angels - tiny flower-headed celestials, each orbited by rings of miniature worlds - imprisoned in silvered birdcages. When their long inhalation ends and they exhale again, the village is reconstituted, and the pilgrims of Hell return to this brief, sweet oasis.

From The Mountain That Breathes

This is the second collection of stories I’ve read by Nathan Ballingrud, after the excellent North American Lake Monsters, which was probably my favourite horror short story collection of the last 10 years, combining serious, granular everyday struggles to put food on the table with the added annoyance of the undead and cosmic horrors. The Atlas of Hell is the second publication of Nathan Ballingrud published by the New Ruins, an imprint of Dead Ink books.

The stories in The Atlas of Hell unsurprisingly convene around an occult instrument known as the Atlas of Hell, which is the decapitated head of a Black Iron monk; cartographers who walk the depths of hell in an attempt to map and describe its environs. They wear black iron cages around their head to protect them from the worst of the visual and spiritual horrors around them. The titular story comes first, and concerns small-time crooks with the help of an occultist who travel into the Louisiana swamp to steal the aforementioned artefact. The plot reminded me of Angel Heart in places, that overwhelming, oppressive humidity rendering every characters sweaty and half-drunk with lethargy and rum.

As a whole the stories sit somewhere between Southern Gothic crime stories and intense, visceral horror. There is a good deal of world building inside The Atlas of Hell, with most of the earthly stories staying within the confines of Louisiana as it follows various down-on-their luck nobodies making deals with people they shouldn’t. Three of the stories, The Atlas of Hell, The Maw and Visible Filth take part in contemporary society, or a future version, while The Diabolist and The Butcher’s Table consider the same region from years ago. Skullpocket is the only story from the original collection that focuses entirely on hell, and I think its the biggest bum note of the collection for me, being a little bit too twee and saccharine for what is objectively quite dark subject matter. It just gets the tone wrong.

Of the six full stories, The Maw and The Butcher’s Table are the two strongest for me, but The Atlas of Hell and Visible Filth were enjoyable too, the latter already having been made into a film. The Maw is an emotionally affecting story about one man’s grief at losing his dog during the end of the world. It portrays the apocalypse as something that just happens, and instead spends its time almost taking the carnage and destruction for granted while focusing on a person’s loneliness and determination to do something risky and stupid to try and find his best friend. I really enjoyed how a very grisly depiction of tall, skinny demons that stitched corpses together into foul jokes took a back seat to a guy determined to find his dog, told through the perspective of a jaded, fed up teenager paid to guide him through an opening into hell, told in a way that she thought of herself as a Deliveroo driver or something. One of the things I like about Balungrud, which you see again here in The Atlas of Hell, is the ability to pull emotions out of the reader beyond just fear and tension. There is genuine sadness and even some quiet, beautiful moments in this story.

The Butcher’s Table is the longest story in the collection, and concerns an occultist who hires a ship and crew to take him to meet a cannibal cult that live in the corpse of a fallen angel. Its equal parts caper and a slow inevitable drag into death. Most of the characters hold hidden agendas which come to light at various stages of the story. Everyone (bar maybe one character, and one you’d not expect) is incredibly self-interested and would happily see the person next to them take a bullet to save five minutes. It all builds into a reckoning with various factions of both earth and hell which was both satisfying while also as visceral as you might expect demons and angel corpses and cannibal cults to be.

There are also additional small two-page vignettes between each story that give a little extra insight into various parts of hell. The Mountain That Breathes is excellent, and offers a unique take on the sort of horror an environment like hell can create. In a way it reminded me of North American Lake Monsters in the sense that the horrific wasn’t necessarily evil or spiteful, but instead just something that exists in the world, like spiders or cancer. I didn’t really care for any of the other vignettes as most of what they talk about are already covered in the other short stories, and I think sometimes horror is better when it’s just hinted or looked at in the peripheral vision, rather than being described in exact terms. I understand these vignettes were added for the UK edition, and wonder if they were there merely as a way to try and offer something new.

In terms of presentation, mythology and subject matter this reminded me more than anything of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood, which is one of my favourite short story collections. Plots, decisions (people only make bad decisions here), personalities and consequences all felt plausible and relatable within the world that Balungrud has built. The collection just felt a bit half-finished, like it needed another 2-3 stories to really bulk out what Balungrud’s interpretation of hell and its affect on humanity looks like. It was largely petty crimes and deals gone bad. I would have liked some wider perspectives, similar to what he created so deftly in his first collection.

The Atlas of Hell is available on paperback now through Dead Ink Books

Pig Wife by Abbey Lee

Wife never leave.

A man and a wife are bound by god himself. They are together forever, till death do them part.

If one of them leaves, it’s a crime against scripture.

Someone who’d turn their back on a friend like that is a goddamn pig…

Who deserves to burn in hell for all eternity.

Pig Wife by Abbey Luck is a bit different from the books I’ve reviewed so far, being a graphic novel. I wasn’t quite sure how to approach this at first as a good chunk of the book relies on visual representation to get some of the more meta elements of the story across. Maybe this is giving the book too much credit though, because at its heart it’s a pretty straightforward horror story.

Pig Wife follows Mary, a teenager who was reluctantly brought to the house of a recently deceased aunt by her mum and stepdad, who is intent on finding financial deeds to the land hoping it will get him out of financial trouble. As well as deeds to the property, which sits on top of an abandoned gold mine, the house holds dark secrets about Mary’s Aunt Pearl. After an argument with her parents, Mary runs away before accidentally falling down the abandoned mine. Lost and disorientated, Mary soon becomes the captive of two pale, dishevelled occupants of a secret underground bunker, Tommy and Ed. Tommy is a hulking, unhinged simpleton who seemingly has no frontal lobe, while Ed is quiet and more reserved, though both men still believe that Mary has been brought to them by their mother and she either needs to become one of their wives, or otherwise is a pig to be slaughtered. The majority of the 540 pages follows Mary in her various attempts to outwit and escape Tommy and Ed, finding out the dark, shameful history of the town and her Aunt Pearl in the process.

The story of Pig Wife is relatively standard, it reminded me a lot of 10 Cloverfield Lane and Split. The central themes of Pig Wife are mental illness and generational trauma, so its by no means light reading. Though tense at times with some adult themes, the book is relatively light on horror. The intention of the graphic novel seems to be to portray all of the characters as products of their upbringing, illustrating how the generational nature of trauma can make real physical monsters of anyone. While this is fine in principle, everything in Pig Wife feels quite surface level and superficial, and the characters (including Mary) are fairly bland. The author seems to assume that giving someone a back story makes them complex, though all of the histories and resultant effects are pretty much tropes at this point. We can see precisely the kinds of messages Luck is trying to get across, we’ve just seen other people make the same points with more nuance and complexity.

The story and character development are not helped by the art style which look amateur and cartoonish. This feels especially jarring when juxtaposed with themes of misogyny, child abuse and christian fundamentalism. I imagine illustrating 540 pages of comic would have been an exhaustive process, particularly because the whole job appears to have been completed by one artist (Ruka Bravo) and the fatigue of drawing the same three characters in a cave really shows at times. There are occasional double-page spreads and what I assume to be chapter illustration which are more on the surreal side, much more abstract, and appear to have taken 10 times as long to render. It doesn’t even stylistically really capture that lo-fi aesthetic that you might find in self-published comics and zines. I wonder if this may have worked better as a black and white graphic novel. The larger illustrations show that the creators clearly have vivid and expressive art styles, but 95% of the book just looks like an Art GCSE project.

If the story was particularly compelling or ambitious then the above wouldn’t have mattered as much. Just look at half of Fantagraphics output, for example. In this case however a fairly mid story combined with low-quality art reduces the impact of both. I was surprised to see Abbey Luck is a writer, director and animator for Disney, FX, Comedy Central and MTV Films as this was clearly a label of love for her (being her first graphic novel) but I doubt Pig Wife would have met any of their editorial standards.

I know I’m not speaking for everyone, as the majority of the reviews seem to be quite positive. This just wasn’t really for me. I considered giving up within a few pages, but despite the 500+ pages it was very quick to read. I wondered if this was pitched more towards a teenage reader, but couldn’t see any evidence of this in supplementary material.

Pig Wife is available to pre-order from bookshop.org. UK Bookshop donate 30% of the cover price to an independent bookshop of your choice, or 10% to an earnings pool that is distributed across participating bookshops each month. This was a free review copy of Pig Wife. Thanks to Top Shelf Productions via NetGalley for providing the opportunity to read this ahead of publication in January 2026.

My Name Isn't Paul by Drew Huff

I pretended to be human for the last seven years and it finally caught up to me.

That’s all I can say. I’m a bug. I’m a parasitic wasp-thing. I think. Fuck. I hardly even know. What I am, I mean. So now I’m sitting in the ‘85 Lincoln, holding a spray can of wasp killer, wondering if it’ll kill me before the cops find me.

I’m dry-heaving, or least the human-looking part of me is. I don’t know what my filaments are doing. Shivering?

Red and blue lights flash through the neighbourhood around me and play over the two-bedroom houses. There are no sirens. The police cars slither up the road. There’s been a murder in the house behind me. Some guy killed his wife. Someone called it in.

I pop the wasp spray can off and on again. Click. Click. Click.

Paul Cattano appears to be a 40 year-old vacuum salesman ‘with a thick dark moustache and ratty little eyes.’ For the last seven years however Paul was in fact Uxxon, a parasitic alien wasp made up of a tangle of thousands of tiny silver filaments. Uxxon had hatched along with their larval siblings from their meat-parent seven years ago, consuming them from the inside-out, floating into the world with the ability to take on a perfect facsimile of anything, living or dead. After their violent birth, Uxxon happened upon the body of Paul in a wood and had been pretending to be him ever since. Every seven years however the wasps find themselves at the start/end of their reproductive cycle, and are taken over by an all-encompassing urge to kill, mate, feed, and lay eggs inside a living human host. The only issue is that Uxxon really likes being Paul, likes his life, doesn’t like being a wasp.

My Name Isn’t Paul is a very short novella, only 67 pages long. Nonetheless, author Drew Huff manages to pack a lot of content into a very short space of time. Just take the content warning as an example: Content Warnings - Death, suicide, violence, accidental animal death (brief and moderately graphic), mentions of domestic abuse, attempt at sexual assault (from a non-human entity without human sexual organs), profanity, self-hatred, mental breakdowns, vomiting, parasites, and humans being eaten from the inside out (off-page, mentioned).

Paul’s character reminded me of the cockroach alien from Men in Black, and overall the story feels thematically quite similar with a focus very much on grand guignol and dark humour. The aliens all talk to each other like blue collar middle aged American slobs, world weary and cynical despite only being seven years old and seemingly on their way to either consuming or replacing the entire human race. While the other aliens seem to accept their lot, Paul/Uxxon seems to find their parasitic wasp-like tendencies distasteful, leading to an incredibly violent existential crisis.

The story does not fuck about at all, spending the bare minimum time on world building before deciding to go fully off the rails. Less than twenty pages into the novella Uxxon is already losing the plot, killing strangers in petrol stations and doing all they can to copulate with as many wasps as they can. There are decapitations galore, liquification of corpses, insects laying eggs in human meat, countless people getting shot in the head, and a sky full of Cthulhu mythos and Great Old Ones looming over all the proceedings.

I found this a wild ride, the rapid fire prose and zero chill making it something very easy to consume and finish in an afternoon. However the explosive and unrelenting nature of the story was also the main reason My Name Isn’t Paul didn’t work as well as it could have. There were some incredible ideas, concepts, mechanics and general world building going on in this story, but none of it was given the space to breathe. As soon as characters were introduced they were either killed, inseminated, eaten or driven insane. There was mentions of Paul’s life, but no major insight or depth provided. Even the concept that Uxxon took over the life of a pretty terrible person who they found dead in a wood and made many aspects of that person’s life much better would have been a very compelling narrative to explore further. The mechanics of the creatures feeding and mating habits barely made sense and the general socio-political dimensions of the parasitic alien race remained vague and underexplored.

I think if My Name Isn’t Paul was extended by even 100 or so pages the narrative could have been given some more space to breathe. The writing style was punchy, descriptions and renditions of these alien creatures felt very visceral and unique. I find it a shame that it probably won’t find mainstream leadership simply through feeling a bit quick and disposable. I hope Huff reapproaches the concepts and characters and gives us something a bit more substantial because I think they have the workings of a great long-form novel here.

This was a free review copy of My Name Isn’t Paul, which will be self-published by the author in November 2025. Thanks to NetGalley for the free review copy. You can read more about the author Drew Huff here, as well as find details of her other books and a portfolio of book cover art.

Secrets You Can't Keep by Debra Webb

A cabin in the woods. Three dead, one in critical condition. Property owned by not just any Tennessee local, but one of the richest men in the country.

Vera Boyett isn’t quite sure what it means. But that’s why Sheriff Gray “Bent” Benton called her: to figure it out. Criminal analysis is what she does best. Even when the town is in panicked shambles, even when the case is more delicate than most…and even when it’s not the only case on her plate.

Vera’s family is caught in a deadly mess of its own. And while her pregnant sister seems an unlikely culprit, each new detail seems to point to her guilt. Desperate to protect her, Vera vows to find out what really happened.

As evidence emerges in both cases, Vera and Bent work to unravel a dangerous web of secrets to get to the truth. But their investigations reveal more than they ever expected…

Vera and her two sisters Eve and Luna have lived in this small Tennesse town their whole life. As children, it seemed they lived with an evil stepmother until a tonne of bodies were found in their back garden - details are vague. As adults, Eve is an undertaker, Luna is a librarian (and pregnant), and Vera is a retired cop, now working as a police consultant for the local sheriff Bent (honest), who is also her boyfriend. A rich millionaire and some as yet unidentified strangers are found naked with multiple stab wounds and Vera is called in to assist the Sheriff with his investigation.

Just like this book, I’m going to keep the review pretty straightforward. Secrets You Can’t Keep is like a Channel 5 police procedural complete with mild romantic undertones. The crime scenes are delicately handled, the sexual relationship between Vera and Bent is essentially told through cheeky comments and a lot of the use of ‘staying over,’ and swearing is used sparingly, if at all. I found the plot drove itself forward well enough, skipping between Vera investigating a triple homicide and the suspicious death of her pregnant sister’s mother-in-law. Some of the plot twists are identifiable a mile away, while others are pretty much put in front of the reader without fanfare. While for the most part it works to keep things simple, it was a bit jarring to see three of the potential culprits talking through their part in the crime in a chapter only halfway through the book. Felt like the reader would have got there eventually and it was a bit of an unnecessary add.

My favourite part of the novel was a conversation between the medical examiner and Vera at a crime scene, that included a full-chested use of misinformation that fentanyl is the most dangerous substance known to man:

‘By the way’ - Collins looked Vera up and down -’you were careful what you touched, right? Even him?’
Vera nodded. ‘I only did the chest compressions’ Worry trickled through her. ‘I did check his carotid pulse and pupils, but that’s it.’
’Good. Because if this is fentanyl poisoning as I suspect,’ Collins went on, ‘you could have ended up in a body bag too.’

[Cue ad break]

Secrets You Can’t Keep is maybe the 176th book by Debra Webb , a USA Today best selling novelist who has sold over ten million books worldwide. Poor Debra probably has no idea what book number this is either as she seems to write about three books a year. I can say with confidence though that Secrets You Can’t Keep is the third book in the Vera Boyett series, though I’ve not read anything by her before and got on just fine (other than not really understanding a few references to them having loads of bodies in their garden as kids), so don’t panic.

Overall it’s a page turner. It feels like the sort of book you’d find in one of those book swap cabinets little English villages sometimes have, the sort of thing you’d pick when you forgot to bring a book with you anyway so just take because its that or a 1996 Microsoft Excel Guide or a book on the Planetology of Baby Names. You sit in some musty old B&B armchair and find Secrets You Can’t Keep is just passable enough to fill some downtime while it decides to piss it down outside. The plot drives along, you find out who did what and why, and there’s some minor peril on the way, even the odd ‘heck’ and ‘damn.’ After 175 books Debra clearly has a handle on how to get a story done although its basically only as good as the time it fills.

This was a free review copy of Secrets You Can’t Keep. Thanks to Thomas & Mercer via NetGalley for providing the opportunity to read this ahead of publication on December 9th.

Orpheus Builds a Girl by Heather Parry

I took professional pleasure in seeing my work achieve results that had never been recorded. While it is undeniably egotistical to wallow in one’s own achievements, I ask the reader’s mercy for just a moment. Having been frustrated in my professional development because of political upheaval in my youth, I had for most of my adult life felt a sense of lost progress, of wasted potential. I had never regained the heralded position for which I had been primed and trained. My ability to create a home laboratory had been hampered by various challenges; in short, I had never achieved the success that I felt I should have. And yet here was my beautiful young wife, whom I had raised from the dead. Here was living, or almost living, proof that first death is but an obstacle to the continuance of our lives. Here was proof that with the correct care, bodies can be regained, and revitalised; that the soul does indeed exist on another plane and can communicate with the human realm, and can, under the correct circumstances, return to the body if first lived in. Here, with me, was a miracle. What greater happiness can a scientist have?

The above quote is taken from the account of Wilhelm von Tore, a German expat living in Key West Florida as he looks back on his life in his final days. He remembers fondly the memories of lying with his dead grandmother for days before being found, of carrying out scientific experiments on behalf of Josef Mengele, and most of all remembers the Cuban girl he fell in love with - Luciana del Carmen Herrera Madrigal. A girl who died of tuberculosis and was taken away from him, who he dedicated the rest of his life to resurrecting. Luciana’s family are poor Cuban migrants, at first grateful that a medical professional was offering free care. But as von Tore moves into their house, denies them access to Luci, even denies them access to her grave, Luci’s family find themselves emotionally manipulated and tricked by a particularly cruel man.

Wilhelm wants the reader to think this is a gothic romance book, something full of tragedy and longing. But Luciana’s sister Gabriela is the other narrator in the book, and she wants the reader to know that really this is a horror book, plain and simple, a story about manipulation and control. By the end of the novel there should be no doubt in the reader’s mind that the story very much sits in the latter camp, irrespective of what von Tore wants us to think. Parry’s novel is very good at getting under your skin, evoking a visceral reaction and anger at the events unfolding. As von Tore experiments with a series of unguents, sculpts protective layers, soaks Luci’s rotting corpse in bleach and solvents, he reduces her into a plaything for his romantic imagination.

The horror in Orpheus Builds a Girl is compounded by the indifference of society. At almost every turn von Tore is helped, supported, financed by others around him; from escaping Nazi Germany at the fall of the third reich, to being given the benefit of the doubt when his ‘Polish nationality’ is questioned. Even when the true extent of von Tore’s horrors emerge, rather than being handed pariah status and a prison sentence, he receives a reluctant admonishment from the judge and wave of sympathetic support from the local community. Meanwhile, those who are supposed to stand up for the vulnerable are annoyed by Gabriela and her family causing a fuss. The way the expected moral response is turned on its head feels like a bad dream at times.

The perspectives are told in alternating chapters, a simple technique which very effectively brings the lives of the Carmen family into collision with von Tore with inevitable dread. Below is an excellent example of why this juxtaposition is so effective, taken from each narrator describing the same moment:

Gabriela - He was a snake from the start. He was wearing all white, a linen suit and a hat made from straw, and he took it off as he came inside. He moved like a small guilty child; he fidgeted at his cuffs and tried not to make eye contact with anybody. He shook Papa’s hand but didn’t speak to the rest of us. He sat down and placed his hands carefully on the arm rests. This settled him. He felt the place was his, and to anyone else he would have looked like the master of the house - a small old man with his chin raised and the air of someone who had been responsible for many ills. A taste burned in my throat, like when you eat something band and your body rejects it.

Wilhelm - The house was large but unfit for the family. It was clear that the purchase of the place was intended to project a level of wealth that they did not have, or at least no longer had. The walls of the living area were adorned excessively (and tastelessly) with gilt-framed paintings and fabric pieces of art, all of which clearly had some value, and there were large vases everywhere, though none of them contained flowers… It was clear to me that I would have to take Luciana’s care into my own hands, for these people could not be trusted to make the correct decision for their children.

Gabriela’s chapters are straightforward, clear, factual, almost like reading witness statements, peppered with disappointment that she could have been so naive, or so desperately hopeful that there was something she could do for her sister. Wilhelm’s chapters on the other hand are filled with florid, overwrought language, affectatious but betraying his prejudice and arrogance. He mentioned Goethe a few times, and I had the impression that in his accounts he was trying to achieve a sort of romantic hopelessness. Having to get through a passage where he considered the possibility of Luci’s corpse still being able to conceive his child was among the most sickening accounts I’ve ever read, the formal, poetic prose almost making the decay smell stronger.

The novel is rendered all the more shocking because it is based on a small collection of true stories of men who captured and stole womens’ bodies to keep for themselves. Orpheus Builds a Girl is a story of possession and obsession, a literal interpretation of the idea that men see women only as objects. In the afterword, the author Heather Parry talks about the repealment of Roe vs Wade, and a long litany of other forms of oppression still happening to women across the world. Parry states that the central question of the novel is who owns a woman’s body?

Our femininity is conditional, depending on what others believe about our race, our gender presentation, our sexuality, our disabilities, our age. Words are placed in our mouth even after we’re dead; we’re said to have consented, vocally, to the desecration of our graves, the removal of our rights. We’re said to have contributed to the causes of our own murders, to have seeded reasons for violence against us.

Orpheus Builds a Girl is a difficult read, equal parts grotesque and rage inducing. But the book is important because of its ability to render such an emotional response to a question that remains as important as ever.

This was a free review copy of Orpheus Builds a Girl. Thanks to ONE, an imprint of Pushkin Press, via NetGalley for providing the opportunity to read this. It’s available to buy on paperback from Pushkin Press.

How to Talk to Your Dog About Murder by Emily Soderberg

The house somehow managed to fit in with the air of soullessness that marked the entire subdivision, and yet be uglier than its neighbours. Built of beige stone, it sprawled in all directions, more like a corporate campus than a personal residence, although I’d never seen a corporate building with turrets…

…A white woman in late middle age answered the door after a few seconds. If I described her outfit, you might get the wrong idea about her. She wore a pink sweatshirt, very pale blue jeans, and white sneakers, and had a white windbreaker tied around her waist… something about the absolute spotlessness of her clothes, the subtlety of her make-up, and her air of complete command meant she gave off an intimidatingly well-put together impression. Like an elementary-school principal all the kids are scared of, but out walking her dog on a Sunday.

So begins the mystery of the grieving old dog in the mansion full of rude rich people who seem to spend all their time gravitating around a kitchen island.

How to Talk to Your Dog About Murder is the debut novel by Emily Soderberg. The novel follows a very eventful fortnight in the life of Nikki Jackson-Ramanathan: struggling pet behaviourist who relies on part-time bar work and selling crafts on Etsy to make ends meet. That is until she receives a very generous offer to walk the dog of a wealthy family, who is seemingly grieving the loss of its owner. Within days of meeting the family the old woman who hired her ends up dead, and Nikki finds herself a suspect alongside the rest of the dysfunctional family.

The novel is a quirky locked-room murder mystery that doesn’t take itself too seriously. It felt very much like I was watching an episode of Monk. It also felt reminiscent of films like Knives Out, following the theme of a spoilt rich family dealing with a murder in the family home. The characters are all distinctive enough, their personalities, relationships and potential motives all casting them in ambiguous light. The peripheral characters, such as Nikki’s friend Ruby, provide some variety in locations, allowing Nikki to become a bit more well-rounded as a character. I also really liked that the book was set in St Louis, which was also the authors home town. I’d like to imagine that some of the people in the author’s neighbourhood have been included in some way.

I found Nikki at times to be a bit of an insufferable character though. It was a really interesting contrast to see how negatively she thought of her over-friendly new neighbour, McKayla, while at the same time she seemingly injected herself into the lives and home of a twice-grieving family without thinking anything else of it. I had to keep reminding myself that she’d only known the van Meer family for a few days before making a daily habit of asking intrusive questions and sneaking around the house for clues. Her obliviousness to the inappropriateness of her involvement in the case verged on the absurd. I know, suspend disbelief etc but if your grandma dies you’d probably ask the dog walker to stop coming around and walk the dog yourself?

On the same tangent I found it a bit of a stretch that she was doing a better job than the police of working the case. It just felt a bit convenient that she had a best friend with a true crime obsession, a husband that studied law, and another friend who was a practicing lawyer. I kept thinking the end of one of her internal monologues would finish with ‘and everyone clapped.’ I think this could have worked better if she had been an experienced pet psychologist and there was a lot more time and energy leaning on her relationship with animals. Like… Ace Ventura: Pet Detective meets Cracker. Given the way the mystery developed and eventually resolved I think this may have been a more gratifying way for the story to have progressed.

How to Talk to Your Dog About Murder would probably also have benefited from tightening the prose a bit. Nikki nodded at someone or something over 20 times throughout the novel, three times on one page. Nobody needs to describe that much nodding. Sentences and paragraphs were at times overwrought (both the quoted paragraphs above are twice as long in the book). Self-corrections and stream-of-consciousness writing have their place, but I feel that crime novels need to be a bit more sparse, generally.

Gripes aside, this was easy enough to read, and the revelations of the crime at the end were satisfying, it felt like all the details were there and I didn’t feel like I’d been rug pulled. As I said earlier, thematically this felt closest in style and approach to an episode of Monk. This would be a great weekend read for someone who’s into the lighter side of crime fiction.

This was a free review copy of How to Talk to Your Dog About Murder. Thanks to Crooked Lane Publishers via NetGalley for providing the opportunity to read this ahead of publication on October 21st.

How to Talk to Your Dog About Murder is available for pre-order from UK Bookshop.org. UK Bookshop donate 30% of the cover price to an independent bookshop of your choice, or 10% to an earnings pool that is distributed across participating bookshops each month.

Model Home by Rivers Solomon

I haven’t heard from my real mother in months, not since an email she sent last October asking to talk, but Nightmare Mother, Ghost Mother - always there in Mama’s absence - texts me now. Children, the message reads, I miss your screams. Come play.

Never satisfied bringing ruin once or even twice, Nightmare Mother sends the message several more times. The text bubbles stack on top of the next like blocks in a toddler’s tower.

After vomiting, I upload a screencap of Nightmare Mother’s threat to my and my sisters’ group chat.

What tf am I looking at, asks Eve.

These texts just got sent to me from Mama’s number.

Okay. But Mama didn’t send those, says Emmanuelle.

I know.

Neither of my sisters says anything more. I shove my phone in my pocket, and the tiny hole in my joggers becomes a big hole. My sisters and I speak daily - we are close - but it’s a closeness that dissolves quickly into loathing on my part.

I don’t tend to read reviews of horror books before reading them (and yet here I am writing one), largely because a) I don’t want to be told its the scariest most troubling book ever and find out its fairly basic stuff, which ruins my day the same as a stand up comedian that isn’t funny; and b) when books are purported to be a mindfuck or have unexpected twists and turns its nice to be surprised. Having said that, I wish I’d read a few more reviews of Model Home before picking it up because I went in with all the wrong preconceptions.

Model Home is the fifth book by Rivers Solomon, an American non-binary author of speculative and literary fiction who describes themselves as ‘a refugee of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.’ I went in completely blind to this book, having been drawn in by one of those instagram spooky horror recommendations that my algorithm insists on throwing my way. The cover certainly sealed the deal, and I am unfortunately someone who very much judges a book by their cover (as must publishers because why else go to an effort to make enticing designs). Before getting into the book itself I’d like to take a moment to raise a glass to ceara elliot, who’s designed a cover that both evokes that sort of blocky 1970’s cool while also feeling quite modern.

The book itself follows the story of Ezri, their siblings Eve and Emmanuel, and their daughter Elijah. Ezri and Elija travel home after family become concerned that nobody has heard from their parents, who still live in their childhood home in a gated community in Dallas, Texas. Their parents are found dead in the back garden, in what was assumed to be a murder/suicide. The children feel differently though, and are forced to reckon with their difficult, traumatic childhoods to try and unpack what actually happened to their parents.

Model Home can be summarised as a meditation on how people deal with severe trauma. I had inklings of where the plot was going to go, but have to say it became somewhat irrelevant roughly halfway through, even with satisfactory explanations (and probably one of the few scenes of what someone might traditionally consider ‘horror’) by the book’s end. The book is more about how emotionally damaged people try to recover, and try to avoid letting similar traumas happen to the next generation. In that sense I think it’s a really effective journey, and certainly by the end all of the earlier events, flashbacks and recriminations made sense.

I was to an extent reading this on a back foot, as I was definitely expecting more of a psychological thriller, haunted house, spirits and dark forces, inexplicable malevolence, etc. but in truth the dark forces are real, relatable, almost more the world of a social worker or a psychologist than a parapsychologist. So on reading the first two thirds or so I probably didn’t get as invested in the book as I could largely because I thought I was reading a different kind of book. I usually try and avoid books that focus on trauma and difficult childhoods, I don’t find the experience of exploring this in a fictional sense particularly cathartic or enjoyable.

All that being said, Rivers Solomon does an excellent job of portraying very imperfect characters. Arguments are frequent, warning signs are swept under, vulnerable people are ignored until its too late. I had a lot of empathy for the children of Mama and Pop, (as they are referred to). Seemingly all of the children and grandchildren have names beginning with E, which is explained in the novel, but does make it quite difficult to follow. I really related to Ezri’s struggle to transcend her experiences and to avoid another cycle of suffering for Elijah, and again it resonated that such as struggle was fraught with obstacles and falls. Some parts felt a little bit over egged - Ezri is at pains to list all of her mental health and personality disorder diagnoses - it felt a bit showy and I would rather have seen such descriptors come out another way.

Model Home’s other theme, which really sits in the background like the darkest of shadows, is the racism that Ezri’s family faced for decades. They were the only black family in a gated Texas community, privately educated and determined to show that they belonged there as much as the white families. The racism they experienced was low volume, oppressive, coercive and incredibly cruel, and without spoiling anything it became the entire axle on which the family’s trauma cartwheels span.

The end of Model Home is incredibly effective at bringing together the previous 250 pages, explaining pretty much all the strange goings on, the evil entity of Night Mother and in the process making Ezri so much more of an empathetic character.

Although I found it a difficult read at times, it sends an important message about the importance of kindness, and never truly understanding what other people have been through.

Model Home is available in hardback from all good booksellers, including Pages of Hackney Please buy books from independent shops as much as you can!

Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa

Holding in both hands an open book three or four centimetres in thickness took a greater toll on my back than any other activity. Being able to see; being able to hold a book; being able to turn its pages; being able to maintain a reading posture; being able to go to a bookshop to buy a book - I loathed the exclusionary machismo of book culture that demanded that its participants meet these five criteria of able-bodiedness. I loathed, too, the ignorant arrogance of all those self-professed book-lovers so oblivious to their privilege. Pain shot through my heavy hand, which my bent neck could only just about support. With the forward incline of this reading posture my lower back, arced so as to crush my internal organs, lost its tug-of-war contest with the earth. Each time I read a physical book, I could feel my backbone bending a little further.

Hunchback is a gloriously transgressive, angry, funny, filthy novella. It packs an incredible amount into its slim 97 pages, following the story of Shaka Isawa, a young Japanese woman with severe spine curvature, who is confined to living in a wheelchair as a resident in a care home owned by her late parents, spending most of her life attached to a ventilator via tracheostomy as she lacks the muscle strength to breathe for herself.

Shaka has all of her needs seen to by the care team at the home, and spends most of her time online, or writing fictional reviews of massage parlours and brothels.

On the site I work for, the most successful combination among male users is first-hand accounts of various adult entertainment venues or lists of top-twenty pick-up spots, together with dating and hook-up apps, while among women, it’s lists of the top-twenty shrines to pray at for rekindling romance, together with adverts for psychic hotlines.

Shaka is paid about 30,000 yen for each article, and combined with a series of erotic novels she has authored under the pen name Sakya, Shaka makes a reasonable income which she donates almost entirely to foodbanks or to anonymously pay for student's university education. Her later parents bought the care home she lives in, so Shaka wants for nothing, other than fantasies of living a normal life, most of all to have sex. Shaka finds out that one of her carers, Tanaka, may be interested for a price.

I want to get pregnant, then have an abortion

I can’t imagine a foetus growing properly inside this crooked body of mine.

I guess I couldn’t withstand labour either.

And of course, taking care of a baby would be out of the question for me.

But I could get pregnant and have an abortion like anybody else. There’s no issue with my reproductive functions.

So I’d like to experience what that’s like.

My ultimate dream is to get pregnant and have an abortion, just like a normal woman.

This passage is really the essence of Hunchback - Shaka wants to have a normal life and experience all of the privileges that most able-bodied people take for granted. It’s beautiful in its straightforward approach to shattering taboos. It’s important to say clearly that for all the offence that some people may choose to hold, the novel is not poking fun, or utilizing shock for the sake of it. The anger drips off the pages, and it forces the reader to reflect on how society treats disabled communities. In a sense it reminded me of The Sellout by Paul Beatty in its ability to be both hilarious and rage-inducing at the same time.

Hunchback is Saou Ichikawa’s first novel and won major book awards in Japan. Ichikawa has congenital myopathy and uses a ventilator and an electric wheelchair, and was the first author with a physical disability to win the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s premier literary award. It’s also been longlisted for the International Booker Prize, which is how it came on my radar. It has been translated into English by Polly Barton, who some might recognize as the person behind the translation of Asako Yuzuki’s Butter.

Much of the anger and body horror in the pages of Hunchback clearly comes from lived experience. This is not a novel which pokes fun at the disabled, if anything it lays bare the disenfranchisement of disabled people in modern society. At times the novel could just as easily read as a long-form essay, but this is not intended as a critique on my part. There are really important messages within Hunchback, delightfully mixed in with some absolute filth.

I picked up my copy of Hunchback from Foyles, and read the whole book in one sitting while sat in an Emergency Department waiting room vomiting blood after a curly fry got stuck in my gullet. Felt like an appropriate book to enjoy under the circumstances.

Homesick by Silvia Saunders

I’m sent back to London with a multipack of dishcloths and a bottle of Glen’s vodka. I am restless on the train, shifting around in my seat, unable to concentrate on my book or my Zodiac Killer podcast. I unlock and lock my phone. I go to the bathroom twice, once just to clutch the edges of the sink and stare in the mirror. Me and Tom haven’t exchanged a single message all weekend. I have endless things I want to say to him, and at the same time nothing.

Back in my seat, I watch as the couple sitting opposite me hold hands in various ways. They interlock fingers, first in one direction, then the other. The woman makes a fist around the man’s thumb, twisting her fingers round and round it. They admire the way the two hands look together, hold them up to the light to better see them. They briefly let go, before touching the pads of their fingers together, one by one. I wish they were both dead.

I have known Silvia since our Goldsmiths’ days, and I’m so happy she’s the first of my pals to get a book out. Honest to god she’s a funny cow and she deserves it more than most others. I remember her work focused on the horrors of being a female in mid-twenties, her stuff always carried the sort of discomfort you’d get from the likes of Peep Show or Camping with a strong female perspective (yes, I know, Julia Davis).

Silvia not only picked up a Comedy Women in Print Prize, she also picked up a much deserved publishing deal with Harper Collins. Homesick is her first published novel and its a doozy.

[ok from this point on I should probably be professional and refer to Silvia as Saunders as though this was a Guardian/Goodreads book review.]

Homesick follows the story of Mara, who unexpectedly comes into an inheritance from her dad, giving her the chance to buy a small property in London, finally escaping from the rental market. She wants her boyfriend Tom to move in, but Tom is preoccupied with working as a newly qualified teacher and suffering from fairly intense depression. Tom needs his home in Birmingham, while Mara tries to make a home for herself with a young couple incessantly shagging upstairs, and an awkward, antisocial neighbor below. Mara’s dealing with a shaky romantic relationship with Tom (who some days struggles to even get out of bed), a strained relationship with her best friend Noor, and navigating the creepy interests of her boss at the library Derek, all while trying to figure out what home means to her.

I read Homesick in two or three sittings, the last half of the book devoured during one train journey. The short chapters at first made it hard to engage with, some of which are only a page or even a paragraph long. I felt myself resetting myself each page rather than getting stuck in. But once I had the tempo of it down it really sucked me in, and was an effective way of showing how time passes, how seasons and people change too. I initially really disliked Tom for his apparent selfishness, but was impressed how over time Saunders manages to encourage empathy for his illness and I came away understanding what Mara saw in him.

Most of the unlikable characters in Homesick have facets of likability, which is a hard thing to pull off. Especially when creeps like Derek exist. There’s a lovely twist at the end regarding Jerry, Mara’s downstairs neighbor. It was really left field but also felt like an authentic slice of East London life. People too often don’t appreciate the intricate and interesting lives of people living just below them. I liked that Mara made the effort to find that out. Tom and Mara’s relationship also develops in a convincing way, and it felt refreshing to come away from a book feeling like there wasn’t really anyone worthy of disdain, other than maybe Baz, who was a twat.

Homesick is also really funny. I mean it won a comedy prize so it ought to be at least a little bit. Much of the humour permeates through as awkward interactions, things mis-spoken, comments off-target, delivered with a straight face and a hidden cringe, which is stuff I know Saunders excels at, so was happy to see much of it survive the editor’s axe. My favourite part was when Mara had to attend to a fainting, grieving, pregnant woman and all she could think to do was soothingly spoon her Ambrosia custard. It was a definite highlight of my reading experience, and worth the admission fee alone.

Homesick is available now on Hardback, Paperback and Audiobook. Why not pick up a copy from an independent bookshop like Pages of Hackney

Paradais by Fernanda Melchor

It was all fatboy’s fault, that’s what he would tell them. It was all because of Franco Andrade and his obsession with Senora Marian. Polo just did what he was told, followed orders. Fatboy was completely crazy abotu her, and Polo had seen first-hand how for weeks the kid had talked about nothing but screwing her, making her his, whatever it took; the same shit over and over like a broken record, his eyes vacant and bloodshot from the alcohol and his fingers sticky with cheesy powder, which the fat pig only ever licked clean once he’d scoffed the whole jumbo bag of crisps…

The conclusion of Paradais by Fernanda Melchor is clear from the very first page. Two teenage boys want something, from the big mansion next door. Polo, a school dropout working as a gardener in a gated community wants money and infamy, and Franco - a lonely, overweight, porn-addicted rich kid wants Senora Marian. Over evenings of drinking themselves stupid, the boys become more frustrated with not having what they feel entitled to and hatch a terrible, violent plan.

This is the second book by Melchor translated into English by Sophie Hughes. The first, Hurricane Season, was a brutal exploration of violence against women, revisiting the murder of a local witch from multiple perspectives. Melchor painted the hopelessness of poverty, of social standing, and of male violence in black and red. While I found Hurricane Season incredibly empathetic and vivid, it was undeniably horrific in its refusal to shy away from the ugly truth of violence. I was taken by Melchor’s ability to evoke empathy for characters who were barely deserving of any.

Paradais stylistically follows a similar imprint to Hurricane Season, sentences are hurried, urgent and seem liable to overflow from the slight 120 pages. Some paragraphs go on for pages at a time, sentences bleeding into each other; an onrush of violence, misogyny, hatred, sadness, anxiety and shame coming at the reader full pelt with very little downtime.

Polo is the main protagonist of the story, Melchor is at pains to portray him as sympathetic, to an extent. The working-class men of Paradais seemingly have two employment opportunities: either the soul-crushing underpaid jobs that humiliate them as much as they benefit their rich bosses, or working for the narcos and all of the violence and trauma that comes with it. Polo sleeps on the floor of his house, using a dirty t-shirt for a pillow while his older, pregnant cousin sleeps in his bed. Polo is in awe of the narcos and dreams of becoming a gangster like his other cousin, Milton (who himself was kidnapped and forced into terrible acts after seeing his friends killed). It wasn’t lost on me that the complex Paradise shares the name of John Milton’s most famous offering, Paradise Lost, which focused on themes of free will and transgression.

One way Paradais differs from Hurricane Season is in the scale of the story. The locations and characters inhabit a smaller world, and from the start Melchor makes the terrible end destination of sexual violence clear. It feels much more like a close character study of Polo and to an extent Franco as well; their aimless, nihilistic little lives, both choosing extreme violence as a means of escape from the drudgery of existence. The final scenes of Paradais are both explicitly rendered as well as terrifyingly real and human. Reality that had sat with the reader for the entirety of Paradais seems to finally hit the two boys in the final act. What was meant to be a carefully planned act of evil transgression turns into a chaotic, alcohol-fueled home invasion, murders rendered even more horrific and terrible by their meaninglessness.

For all its vivid violence and sexualised language Melchor manages to beautifully compartmentalise the narrative. We understand that we’re following Polo’s troubled thinking and mindset, and in doing so we’re afforded a chance to empathise with the unempathisable. I’ve read several reviews about Melchor’s work and how it orbits the world of violence against women, but I think it almost does the opposite in that it really orbits the world of violence committed by men. I understand that despite Sophie Hughes’ expert translations, some of the complexity of language has been lost in translation from Spanish, as Melchor is known for using wordplay with Mexican dialect and vernacular.

I find it a hard book to recommend to a general audience because there is a great deal of triggering language and imagery burned into every page. But I think there are some really important insights about gender-based violence and perceptions of modern Mexican society for those who are prepared for a challenging read.

Review - The Cabin at the End of the World

Leonard says, “Before you go inside to get your dads, you have to listen to me. This is important.” Leonard crawls out of his sitting position and onto one knee, and his eyes brim with tears. “Are you listening?”

Wen nods her head and takes a step back. Three people turn the corner onto the driveway: two women and one man. They are dressed in blue jeans and button-down shirts of different colors; black, red, and white. The taller of the two women has white skin and brown hair, and her white shirt is a different kind of white than Leonard’s. His shirt glows like the moon, wheras hers is dull, washed, almost gray. Wen catalogs the apparent coordination in how Leonard and the three strangers dress as something important to tell her dads. She will tell them everything and they will know why the four of them are all wearing jeans and button-down shirts, and maybe her dads can explain why the three new strangers are carrying strange long-handled tools.

Leonard says, “You are a beautiful person, inside and out. One of the most beautiful people I’ve ever met, Wen. Your family is perfect and beautiful, too. Please know that. This isn’t about you. It’s about everyone.”

I’d heard a bit of a stir around Paul Tremblay, in particular about his novel A Head Full of Ghosts. As is always the way you can never find the book you wanted to check out, but another novel by him called The Cabin at the End of the World was on display in Foyles and seemed interesting, so I thought I’d give it a try (who said point of sale tables don’t work).

The book starts intriguingly enough, a young girl named Wen is playing outside in a grass field while her adoptive parents, Eric and Andrew, unpack their things into a small cabin in New Hampshire. A large man comes up and starts talking to Wen, shortly after 3 more people follow, all armed with brutal looking medieval weapons.

What follows is a story that mostly plays out in the front room of the cabin. The four strangers, who had never met each other before that morning other than via online chatrooms, are convinced that either Eric or Andrew must voluntarily offer themselves up as a sacrifice, or the world will end. The strangers supposedly have had nightmares showing them what will happen if this doesn’t happen. Obviously, both Eric and Andrew are convinced these are homophobic maniacs and actively struggle against them. Meanwhile the television in the background peppers the action with news bulletins show stories of floods and other disasters, spurring the strangers on even more in their belief that either Eric or Andrew must die.

The premise is interesting, but its written in a fairly ham-fisted way. Each chapter is written from the perspective of Wen, Eric or Andrew, and their thought processes and internal monologues are prosaically recorded on the page. I feel this would have been an excellent, thought provoking short story on the spectrum of belief vs bigotry, but what we have instead is reading over each character deciding when to loosen their ropes, or whether to rugby tackle or kick someone in the leg. It felt like a philosophical conversation you might have over a beer translated into people getting smashed in their torsos with hammers.

More than anything, it read like someone wanted their book to be transcribed into a screeplay. The whole thing felt very readable, very cinematic. It felt like the sort of thing that would fit better as an 80-minute film. I did not know at the time, but was unsurprised to find out it had in fact been made into a film. It probably works better that way.