August 08 2026, 12:19
Freaky Tales
Director: Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck
Release year: 2024
Four tales set in an admirably accurate 1987 Oakland, California, held together by a through line of a cheesy TV advert for a cult-like group offering a course in Psytopics. The writer/directors were coming off the back of the billion-dollar grossing Captain Marvel in 2019, and for this they netted some big stars for essentially a super-stylised, low budget Pulp Fiction homage with a hint of Repo Man. And they don’t seem to have anything new in the works. Weird.
Pedro Pascal and Tom Hanks bring their acting chops and give some of the slight stories weight. Ben Mendelsohn is impressively gross and unpleasant as the police inspector also running a gang of rampant nazis, who blast through all four tales in a whirl of racist, homophobic, violent energy. The theme of the film seems to be how to use the neon-green power of Psytopics to fight injustice and kill nazis. The violence manages to be both cartoonish and unpleasantly realistic. It’s fun in places, but has a slow first half and suffers from a lack of narrative oomph.
I do admire the idea of making something to celebrate a place you grew up in, and then bringing in people who lived there at the time to collaborate on it. The filmmakers’ love of Oakland, rap music, the cinema as a social activity, basketball, eighties fashion, and video stores, is on full display. It’s clearly made with love.
August 06 2026, 21:09
I, Madman
Director: Tibor Takács
Release year: 1989
Book shop clerk and aspiring actress Virginia (Jenny Wright) loves pulpy noir horror and can’t put down a book by new discovery Malcolm Brand (Randall William Cook). The gruesome details and savage story line excite her, but they also keep her awake at night, and new boyfriend Richard (Clayton Rohner) thinks she shouldn’t read them. Brand’s final book, I, Madman, appears mysteriously at her door, and once she starts reading it, events from the book blend into the real world, and soon she is being terrorised by the dead Malcolm Brand.
I love that such an obscure film, with many actors appearing in little else, took such big swings with the story. Virginia is a bookish, nerdy heroine who wants to get lost in fantasy. A monster is shown in stop motion. It’s meta before meta was cool. This was the year of Halloween 5, Friday the 13th Part 8 and A Nightmare on Elm Street 5 – horror films were fizzling out as a cultural force. It’s a lovely surprise to find some creativity this late in the cycle.
I, Madman shares some DNA with the Elm Street films, mashed with Frankenstein and Jack the Ripper. Virginia’s new boyfriend, homicide detective Richard, is rooted in the physical world, and won’t believe her explanation of the killings that are happening around her. She tells Mona (Stephanie Hodge), her workmate at the book shop, that she isn’t sure if Richard is for her, perhaps because she senses his lack of inner life and imagination. The ghost of Brand is more real to her than Richard is, and in an early lovemaking scene, Virginia gets off on recounting to Richard the devilish deeds in the book, which he seems confused by. She wants more than her daily life can give her.
While Brand is clearly evil, there’s also something powerful and useful about him to Virginia. He kills an actress she’s jealous of, as well as a man she’s friends with who wants to become a lover – a rival to Richard. Brand is collecting body parts to recreate his great love and wears them: a red-haired scalp, ears, nose, lips, until by the end he’s impressively grotesque. Richard saves Virginia by arriving in the nick of time at the book shop, but it’s Virginia who figures out the spell that sends Brand back where he came from. It’s a pleasingly feminist film.
Jenny Wright was nominated for the Saturn Award for Best Actress in 1989, and I can see why. It’s a supple, interesting performance in a surreal low-budget horror film. She lost to Demi Moore in Ghost, and was also up against Nicole Kidman and Anjelica Huston. This film punches well above its weight. It did win one award, Best Film at the Avoriaz International Fantastic Film Festival in 1990. I can see why.
July 31 2026, 19:02
The Hotel
Author: Daisy Johnson
First published: 2024
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, a little girl who makes friends with someone only she can see, and so on. The land the hotel is built on is cursed and the hotel itself takes on a life of its own.
It’s labelled a novel, but really this is a slim collection of short stories about a place. I liked the evocative details and variety of voices. About halfway through I stalled because there wasn’t any narrative drive. It’s a series of crisply written ghost stories. The voices are all female, drawn to the hotel for different reasons, and most come to a bad end.
My favourite chapter is from the perspective of the house-ghost itself, an ever-changing thing who calls the hotel Mother. It’s a lighter note in a mostly bleak experience. In the hotel, men are not to be trusted, but neither are the women. It’s a cold world and death isn’t the end of it.
May 30 2026, 18:18
Free play
I’ve been reading a lot of books about the psychological aspects of making art:
- How to Write One Song, Jeff Tweedy
- Free Play, Stephen Nachmanovitch
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig
- Art & Fear, David Bayles & Ted Orland
- Meditations for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman
There’s a tremendous amount of practical wisdom distilled into all these books.
This spurt of May research was triggered by a few things. In March, I split my one (true) notebook out into four—for creative writing, songwriting, art, and life in general. A parental voice in my head was telling me to “just fucking pick one or you won’t get anywhere”, but I know now that’s fighting my nature and simply doesn’t work.
With a new songwriting notebook, it became clear my guitar lessons weren’t taking me in the direction I wanted, so I decided to take a break. My writing brain wanted to write songs, even though I was still a beginner on guitar—guitar technique didn’t interest me, not yet anyway, and I’d learned enough to explore songs on my own for a bit.
I got into a good groove with the creative writing notebook. The art notebook remained empty. At the same time, I was watching YouTube channels on learning languages, learning multiple skills in parallel, software engineering, guitar, piano, singing, and yes, starting a YouTube channel. As a technician, I wanted to know how it worked behind the scenes.
This is a known pattern I fall into. Being thought-scattered without a project(s) to practice on feeds my discontent. It feels like procrastination, even though I’m not working on anything. The year wasn’t going how I wanted. Old patterns were returning. Whenever I’m looking to find some clarity and coherence, I turn to books.
Jeff Tweedy, in the intriguingly-named How to Write One Song, writes like a wise, kind friend, and his advice is backed up by musical success with the band Wilco. There are lots of specific techniques in the second half about writing songs, but my main takeaway is the importance of both treating songwriting lightly—to play like a child, for the fun of it, because it’s joyful to do—and being serious enough to do it often, with attention, care and craft.
In Free Play, Stephen Nachmanovitch, as a professional improvising violinist, has a wealth of wisdom to share on the improvisation part of making art. He brings a more spiritual, slightly philosophical perspective, but the book is still an easy read. He stresses the importance of listening to the unconscious while making. Pre-conscious material can be channelled through the body and fingers. Improvising is a practice of moment-by-moment micro-experiments where things are tried, they work as expected or don’t, and so on. There are no mistakes, just an endless conversation in whatever medium the artist is working in, continually spinning raw material into existence.
I went to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance next because this was one of the books from my mid-twenties that got me into software engineering, and I sensed it might have something to say about my current problems with “art engineering”. It’s a philosophical enquiry into the experience of doing technical work, and through the concept of Quality, teases out the role of intuition in understanding and solving problems. Pirsig doesn’t talk about generating art, but instead states that doing work well is the bridge between technology and the arts.
I picked up Art & Fear because I wanted to be thorough, and it’s a slim book, another one from my soul-searching twenties. It lists the blocks, both internal and external, that an artist can experience, and offers advice on getting around them. Like Tweedy, it strongly advocates for art to be something ordinary, daily, normal, and not tied too tightly to identity and being successful. To create from inside yourself is to be vulnerable, and that’s the difference between making art and making crafts. Artists have to find a way to bare their souls while not taking the response of the world too seriously. That one hit home.
Finally, Meditations for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman, cleansed my palate nicely, taking a down-to-earth look at what it’s like to live in today’s always-on, everything’s-available, anything’s-possible culture. It makes people unhappy, and he says that by facing up to our (often grim) reality we can relax and do what’s actually important to us.
Those were five books about being creative that look at different aspects of making things in a world that can feel overwhelming. I recommend them all (with a caveat on Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, because it was least impactful to me now and took a lot of energy—and I skipped some of the history of philosophy sections this time!).
What did I learn? What was I made to remember?
- Finish small projects often, and learn while making things. Write songs on guitar when still crap at guitar.
- Forget external validation, be ambitious to make good stuff that could only come from you.
- Separate improvising from editing. Get material into the world, then work on it. Create systems that make this easy.
- The best raw material comes from listening to what’s bubbling up from the unconscious.
- Be joyful, playful, relaxed, and lose yourself in making things.
- Playing as kids was pure art-making, self-making. It was ordinary. It was a daily thing. Collaboration was easy. Knowing what you liked was easy. Losing yourself in doing something was easy. That’s the state to get into.
- Let the ideas and feelings flow, and express yourself in play.
May 24 2026, 21:43
Authority
Author: Jeff Vandermeer
First published: 2014
I read this in 2018 and thought I didn’t finish it. After the joys of Annihilation, I gave it another try, and what do you know, not only had I actually finished it last time, but instead of the dismissive frustration I remember, it was good. Really good. My brain tricked me. Memory cannot be relied on.
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, and the assistant director makes his life difficult from the outset. Control reports to a voice-camouflaged superior who directs him in his probing of the building and the previous director’s many decades of notes and reports. We also learn Control’s mother is a high-ranking leader in government who got him the role as a favour and a ‘last chance’.
I don’t know what my problem was in 2018, because I loved Authority in 2026, gulping it down over a few days. It must be something to do with my changing taste. All of the set pieces I remembered, that I was convinced were in the first half of the story, were spread evenly and effectively over the whole. Perhaps the final fifty pages could have been twenty, but hell, that’s nitpicking.
Where Annihilation was a report by the Biologist from inside Area X, Authority is more like an uncanny spy novel, with corporate intrigue, interrogations and weird science. It isn’t as pure perhaps—there’s a unique hit that comes with a reader’s first experience of the world of Area X—but it is fascinating in a satisfyingly different way. I'm going to wait a while before trying the last book in the trilogy (although it's hard to read Anita Brookner again after this).
May 09 2026, 13:28
She Who Remains
Author: Rene Karabash
First published: 2018
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 her unnamed mother and her brother, Sále. The villagers live under the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini, a set of ancient Albanian laws passed down through families. Murash was killed because Bekija turned down the offer of arranged marriage to become a sworn virgin.
Men rule the villages, and women have little agency. The night before her unexpected wedding, Bekija loses her virginity, and she knows if that is discovered her father will be shot. To avoid this, she renounces her female identity and takes a vow of chastity so she can begin a life as a man. She changes her name to Matija. However, this unleashes a series of brutal decisions and actions under the archaic laws of the Kanun.
I read She Who Remains in one sitting. It’s short, 35,000 words or so, and the stream of consciousness style, short chapters and changing formats kept me reading. The story rushes along, told to a “Mrs Journalist”, possibly the author, with details of Albanian life dropped unexplained into the lyrical prose. The fact that Matija can’t read sets up the second half of the book, which has surprising twists and a satisfyingly emotional ending.
Translated by Izidora Angel.
April 30 2026, 20:30
The Palm House
Author: Gwendoline Riley
First published: 2026
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, leading to Putnam handing in his resignation. Laura naturally falls into her role of appeasing Putnam’s increasingly miserable and angry moods, leading her to reflect on how she came to be where she is in her life.
Laura remembers the humiliations of her family growing up, and her rocky relationships with various narcissistic men, including a truly horrible semi-famous standup comedian, and later a desperate-for-attention theatre actor. Laura’s mother is cut from the same cloth as the mother in Riley’s last book, My Phantoms, which was brilliant, but so unpleasant in the mother-daughter dynamic that I was glad to finish it.
The Palm House is a gentler read than that, more amusing and whimsical in places, but still isn’t afraid to go for the jugular. The dialogue is exquisitely structured to feel both natural and layered with the complexities of interpersonal relationships. Riley’s knack for finding the telling detail is exemplary.
April 25 2026, 10:25
A Start in Life
Author: Anita Brookner
First published: 1981
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. His enthusiasm stuck in my brain, and over the last five years I’ve found myself buying her novels in second-hand bookshops. Whenever I dust and move my books around, I notice the growing Brookner list, and because my brain loves (the idea of) a project, I thought I should read her novels from first to last. I spotted a first edition hardback of A Start in Life on Amazon for less than fiver, and here we are. (That cover is glorious.)
Dr Ruth Weiss is a forty-year-old academic remembering her middle class childhood in a London flat with her eccentric parents. The family is looked after by Ruth’s grandmother, and when she dies, they employ a housekeeper, Mrs Cutler. Ruth's mother Helen, an actress, and father George, who owns a book business, create a ruinously decadent threesome with Mrs Cutler, who cleverly makes herself essential, supplying alcohol and a sympathetic ear to both while doing as little as possible for her money.
Ruth escapes the quietly poisonous threesome through her tenacious love of literature. She wins a place studying at a Paris university and begins to blossom, even as she harbours serious doubts about her own self worth and place in the world, especially in relationships with men. Her parents don’t give her much thought until their grimly bohemian setup begins to fall apart.
Brookner writes wonderfully about the psychological games people play, especially narcissists who can’t bear to think about other people beyond what they need from them. Her descriptions are cuttingly precise, and the deep melancholy of Ruth’s inner life is explored gently, obliquely, but is clear all the same.
This is her first novel, which was published when she was fifty-three years old, and she wrote over twenty more after it, but her talent is clear immediately. She describes A Start in Life as an investigation of her early years, and she was making up her style as she went along to help with that self-analysis, but it’s also not autobiographical, or at least not literally so. There are strong parallels to her own parents, but Ruth Weiss is not Anita Brookner, and because she was such a private person, we'll never know the overlap. It’s creative writing as a type of therapy, and I love it.
April 13 2026, 14:37
Diary of an Oxygen Thief
Author: Anonymous
First published: 2006
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 he describes in malicious detail how he manipulates a woman into falling in love with him before dismantling her emotionally just because he enjoys seeing her in pain. I had to make a decision at that point if I wanted to continue.
It's written well. The voice is narcissistic, amusing in places (but nowhere near as funny as it thinks it is), self-aware, and dripping with self-loathing. He foreshadows a comeuppance at the end to try to make the details of his emotional abuse worth reading, as if it's all okay because revenge was had, and this is also an attempt to manipulate the reader. It worked on me, because I finished it.
The drawn out and complicated plot to professionally undo our anonymous voice is woefully inadequate compared with the many women he abused before he became sober. It's a strange story, and it comes back to the central conceit. There is art, there is the artist, but what to make of something whose origin is deliberately obscured? It could be an artfully constructed fiction. That's impressive. It could be a narcissistic damage limitation exercise by a terrible person. That's something else altogether. It seems to me that the Anonymous moniker only serves the commercial interests of the publisher.
April 05 2026, 15:13
Annihilation
Author: Jeff VanderMeer
First published: 2014
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, so it needs to be a strong gut feeling for me to go back.
With Annihilation, I remembered reading it in 2017, before the film came out, and I remembered the excitement and awe I felt in the details of Area X, and how the story’s central mystery captivated me. I wanted to read it again as a writer. I wanted to understand the techniques that made it work.
Five people are chosen by the Southern Reach, a secretive government agency, to travel to Area X, a mysterious coastal land somewhere in the United States sealed off from the outside world. Each has an area of expertise—biologist, psychologist, surveyor, anthropologist and linguist. In their training, they are told not to reveal their names to each other, and the secret mission is to find a previously established basecamp and investigate the area with their various skills. It quickly dawns on them that they have been deceived about the nature of Area X.
The first thing I noticed was how rich the description was. It’s written in first person from the perspective of the biologist, so she knows the names of all the vegetation and spots the patterns in nature, and she is the first to be suspicious of what’s happening biologically in Area X. The mystery is deepened further by her backstory, which she reveals gradually, and the weird power dynamics playing out in her team. VanderMeer’s economy of storytelling is exemplary. Major events are described matter-of-factly through the biologist’s studious gaze. She is the purest scientist in the team, and her ability to see clearly the group’s dramas makes for a lean, fast-paced read.
I don’t want to say much more about the plot. It’s become on second reading one of may all-time favourite novels. It’s inspirational how so little prose can communicate so much about a character’s inner life while they undergo cataclysmic events in their outer environment. There are many ingenious plot seeds that flower into weighty moments later in the story—the journals each character is asked to write in, the tower going into the ground—if you read it, you’ll know. Read it!