Chris Dow

This is a fascinating text for a few reasons: given its proximity to World War II (22 Cells... was published in 1947) the portraits of some of the men are surprisingly humanising; the language used very much reflects the limitations of psycho-analysis in the 1940s; and the overall message is not one of heinous villainy, but of fear in how easily ‘normal', often unremarkable people, can be swayed towards something as violent and uncompromising as hard right fascism.

The book doesn't try to go too deep into the character of each of the 22 men on trial, but scratches enough through either direct conversation and analysis, supplementary materials provided by those close to the accused, or through historic anecdotes of childhood inferred from publicly available sources, to categorise the men as being either the tragic result of trauma, neurology, or just unscrupulous ‘bad eggs'. Kelley is careful however never to cast aspersions of evil - these were regular men driven, for their own reasons, to evil deeds. Nurture over nature.

The final chapter ‘What does it mean to America?' hits hardest as it rings terrifyingly true in 2026.

“Many people will say that this is a country of free press and of free speech. After all, the American racists are just talking or writing, and anyone in America has a right to talk or write as he pleases. This is quite true. But, at the start, Hitler and Streicher and Ley and Rosenberg were just talking also.”“The power of the spoken word has been emphasised over and over. [...] We allow ourselves to be overcome by emotional assault and battery and in turn use it to try to destroy the concepts and ideals of others.”“They use[d] racism as a method of obtaining personal power, political aggrandizement, or individual wealth. We are allowing racism to be used here for those ends. I am convinced that the continued use of these myths in this country will lead us to join the Nazi criminals in the sewer of civilization.”

Kelley goes on to suggest how the America of the late 40s ought to protect against the same bubbling threat that allowed Hitler and his cronies meteoric rise to power: democracy and education. How depressing that 80 years on, the political landscape is starting to look worryingly similar across the globe.

There are number of ways to ‘read' this text.

Is it awkwardly paced and poorly written due to inexperience, or lack of editing? Or is it terribly written in service of it being the diary of an obviously paranoid, recovering alcoholic? Is it method?

Is the book structured across three short chapters in order to fit a literary arc of setup, stasis and then payback / soft redemption? Or is it just a bit... y'know... lazy?

Are the constant appeals to prospective publishers semi-autobiographical? A mirror being held to modern publishing and the texts that do and don't get picked up? Or just a lazy plot device to further ground the story as amateur, giving it a free pass for its ugly delivery?

I think it's worth saying that those who seem to receive the book negatively wholly as a result of them not wanting to ‘side with the narrator' are not doing much to argue the case for media literacy in the 2020s. The lead is, if reviewed solely on their actions, a real shit, but there are enough nuggets peppered through the text to suggest unresolved trauma. The female foil of the text is also, if the narrator's account is to be believed, a real shit. You do know that you're allowed to engage with media without it being a tacit endorsement, right?

The book seems to flirt with the idea that it might tackle class, or explore where the worlds of art and advertising overlap or repel, or gentrification, or wider tenets of ‘modern masculinity', but nothing's ever given enough time. Again and again I felt myself completely unsure if the glimmers of good or interest were by design, or just accidental.

There are two more books in this series. I have no idea if they continue this story or move to other characters, settings and scenarios. If nothing else, the book made me inquisitive to what could follow this.

It feels like Antioch is largely unknown, which is a shame, because it's excellent. It's a zombie story - a post-apocalypse story - but not in a lazy, ripe-for-sequels, boy-we-hope-this-franchise-takes-off kind of young adult fiction way. This is much closer in tone to something like The Walking Dead comics, where zombies and the end-of-the-world setting are really just set dressing: a catalyst that allows the author to explore deeper, more interesting questions.

Does doctrine allow for situational improvisation? How do people of faith balance piety against pragmatism? Can we ever escape or outpace trauma? What drives us to act on emotion versus instinct? Where does life end and death begin?

The author describes Antioch as ‘low fantasy', but it feels far more literary in its delivery. Clever metaphor and careful character studies feed these questions to the reader organically rather than didactically. Alongside the larger themes, it's also a story filled with vivid action, layered characters, and a well-paced, wrap-around plot that moves seamlessly between location, faction, and time period as the narrative demands, without ever losing momentum.

It would be very easy, when writing a book like Antioch, to take the blunt, black-and-white route - religion is bad. But at no point does it feel like Harlan's preaching. Instead, faith is explored through a range of deeply human positions: it heals and it harms; it galvanises and it isolates; it creates meaning and it justifies destruction.

Antioch is a fantasy novel, but only ever in a genre-adjacent way. At its core, it's a book about faith, and how far those who believe are willing to bend, compromise, or break when belief meets friction.

This is not a very good book.

Viktor, the lead and the titular Villain for Hire, is a bad guy. Aury is clearly trying his hardest to write this bad guy as a subversion of superhero fiction expectation. He's an antihero, you see?

Except in order to remain likeable, Viktor's villainy is also increasingly explained away as being in service to the heroes who he truly respects. He's a paid foil. Which again, could have been an interesting subversion of hero and villain archetypes, exploring ideas of hierarchy or order.

But that subversion never really materialises. Viktor's attitudes towards the other players in the piece are so muddled that any sense of a coherent moral position collapses. You could argue that as the wider narrative progresses, the author is trying to build some sort of system of morality, but it's never in service of anything other than driving the protagonist to another power fantasy set piece or power fantasy sex scene.

Viktor is framed as a villain, but only so long as that framing doesn't threaten his likeability. His villainy is softened, redirected, or justified whenever necessary, which drains the premise of any real tension. What remains is not moral ambiguity, but convenience.

I know it's become incredibly fashionable, especially in the era of cheap eBooks and subscriptions, to leverage the MCU-ification of modern media to string people through sub-par narratives by way of inferred obligation. Villain for Hire feels like a product of that exact environment: a book that gestures toward subversion while relying on familiarity and escalation to keep the reader moving forward.

Perhaps the series' biggest strength is in being as overt as it is in its rendition of “super hero fanfiction with boobs”, holding a mirror to the entertainment industry more widely. Is this really what people want?

A short novella about about regret and acknowledgement. The narrator, primarily through observation of and friendship with a younger neighbour with learning difficulties, unpacks his life to that point.

As the year shifts, in narrative, from 1999 to 2000, there's quiet reflection that, despite fearmongering of Y2K techno-collapse, things, as people, seldom change.

A brisk work, dripping with properly human questions and concerns. The protagonist, Hirai, a woman approaching 40, finds herself surveying her life - working an unfulfilling job, sharing a flat with another middle-aged woman, harbouring a borderline repulsion towards men - and begins to question not only how she fits into life and society, but whether there is any life left within her at all.

A frequent visual motif finds Hirai sprawling herself on her bed, imagining that she were dead. Considered alongside the title of the novella, this refers both to the literally empty filament-shell 3D-printed dogs her flatmate creates as tacky mementos for those who have lost pets, as well as Hirai's own feeling of emptiness. The book communicates the physical sensation of a midlife crisis palpably. This is complicated further by Hirai's complex feelings toward maternity (a desire, but also a removed “otherness”) and love. It becomes increasingly clear in the text that Hirai is asexual, as the book never suggests any romantic interaction or interest toward either her female flatmate, Suganuma, or any of the male characters she observes only with a kind of confused anthropology. Hirai views herself as an ageing vessel, unsure of where she fits within the world.

The subtext of pandemic loneliness and the confusing normality of the post-pandemic world further sets the scene for Hirai's stasis. The book's ending, one of black humour but ultimately hopelessness, scratches at a very modern question: as life stages become blurrier, and traditional progression markers - relationships, families, careers, material status - become destabilised, how do we measure personal success and fulfilment?

Tales from the Planet Earth is a fascinating collection of short sci-fi stories. 18 authors, from almost as many countries of the world tackle a shared prompt: alien possession. Whilst some stories are naturally more successful than others, it was interesting to see how the authors used this simple shared narrative dressing to explore a wide range of human concerns. A loss of agency is almost always the central thrust, but through this disempowerment, authors tackle intimacy and relationships (Contacts of a Fourth Kind — Ljuben Dilov), national exceptionalism (User Friendly — Spider Robinson), collective shame (Don't Knock the Rock — A. Bertram Chandler), cultural appropriation (Fiddling for Water Buffaloes — Somtow Sucharitkul), age and grief (On the Inside Track — Karl Michael Armer) and much more.

Scattered reviews of the last 40 years sometimes critique the collection's length or lack of editorial sharpness, but I think they miss the point of the book. The prompt - alien possession - is a catalyst, and the outcomes are arguably less important than the project's boundaries themselves. Falling between distinct voices, tenses, and perspectives, each story holds a mirror back towards humanity. Sometimes with a sense of softness and warmth, sometimes with acerbic disdain. When the aliens inhabit to observe, we're often given lilting slice of life stories of gentle interaction. Flies on the metaphorical walls of our brains. When the aliens are framed more as recognised antagonists, they are almost always characterised as such to foreground human failings first and foremost.

Growing up, my Dad used to say, believing himself prescient and philosophical: “the only time the human race will really club together and stop killing each other will be when we have a common alien threat to fight”. The authors of Tales from the Planet Earth posit that even in this scenario, we'll still step on each other's toes either in intentional duplicitous and sycophantic servitude, or through mostly accidental bumbling inaction.

I feel it's important to note that I played 2023's videogame adaptation of The Invincible late last year, way before I sat down to read its source material. Although different in execution and narrative, the experiences pair extremely well together. The game may end as the book begins, with the titular ship landing on Regis III, though it doesn't overtly care whether or not it canonically works as a prequel. It does show though that narratives across media often need different arcs of motivation: 2023's adaptation ends with a glimmer of hope, 1964's novel, less so. The value in playing first and then reading for me, has been to make Lem's descriptions of this strange planet of alternative evolution somehow even more unsettling.

The Invincible is a hard sci-fi novel about a rescue mission. The Condor, a hulking starship visits Regis III for research, but within weeks of touch down, all contact is lost. The Invincible, its sister ship, arrives a year on to find out what has happened. We soon realise, alongside Rohan the ship's first navigator and wider crew, that human curiosity and hubris ensured that for all on The Condor and The Invincible, the very act of landing was to sign a death sentence.

Much of the imagery in this book revels in the grandiosity of The Condor and The Invincible, pushing them to feel almost as analogues for a real life vessel like The Titanic. These are crafts too big to fail. The opening especially pores over the construction of the ship, stating confidently how it functions, how it's secured. It's built to spec, built to purpose. The crew are safe.

However, as soon as the crew and craft of the Condor are located, things shift as people desperately try to unpick how and why disaster struck. That it takes as long as it does to look beyond known ideas of science and nature even when presented with evidence that so immediately complicates the crew's understanding feels like the real death knell. Suggestions that circle the answer are laughed off. The eventually identified ‘enemy' - a mechanical insect swarm thought to have developed through years of ‘necroevolution' - is never really believed to be a threat that can't be handled by human might and grunt until it's long too late. The crew survey the land and its inhabitants as needing to fit a human paradigm of power, intelligence and purpose: the swarm cannot possibly represent the apex of life and evolution on Regis III precisely because it is not recognisably human in form or function. The swarm both could and could not give a fuck in equal measure. It is. That's all it ever aspired to do.

Late in the final chapter, on a final, seemingly hopeless mission, Rohan is finally able to observe the swarm with a quiet reverence, reflecting, with a deserved respect and distance that “not everything everywhere is for us”. An incredible read.

“Was it worth using all of our strength and energy to destroy it, only because to begin with we took it for a lurking enemy who first ambushed the Condor, then us? How many extraordinary phenomena like this, so foreign to human comprehension, might lie concealed in space? Do we need to travel everywhere bringing destructive power on our ships, so as to smash anything that runs counter to our understanding?”

A weird side effect of pushing myself to read this year has been a slight withdrawal from playing videogames. My de facto passion since I was about 4 or 5 years old, I've found myself sitting down, turning on the Switch, or my PS5, or my Rog Ally X and just having no desire to play. Books always felt like their own thing, so why has my passion for play dulled so much as I build reading habits back up after years of dormancy?

Maybe it links to a different realisation; that in terms of writing, there is no longer any difference between the best games, books, television or film.

My favourite narrative adventures: Firewatch, Kentucky Route Zero, Mouthwashing; they're as good as any story told in print or via moving pictures. But then, naturally, as we drop down the tiers from great, to good, to passable, the same must apply in the nadir too. A game can be enjoyable, whilst remaining pointless. Entertainment and cultural value can overlap, but they can be distinct too.

Case in point: the pulpy, sexed up nonsense of Villain for Hire aims to entertain and to titillate. And it succeeds. It's full of ugly sentence work, stilted dialogue, and spelling errors, but still it's an energetic, pacey read. If you're trying to review the author's control of language, or skill for characterisation, you're in for a bad time, but if you're looking at the book like you would a Zach Snyder film, or Stellar Blade I think it's hard to be annoyed.

Art doesn't need value to have purpose, and I think I'm realising as I try to expand my media diet, that the hit you get from cartwheeling about as Bayonetta, or watching Planet Terror is pretty close to what author Jay Aury is selling here.

Love Machines is a timely book about an urgent subject. Sadly, ‘neccesary' does not equal ‘good'.

Human relationships with synthetic personas whether under the guise of friendly affirmation, grief counsel, comic escapism, or sexual fufillment are now prevalent enough that we can no longer view them as nerdy edge cases. Everyday people use readily available apps or websites, and are reshaping our understanding as to the rules of intimacy, care, and connection. This is a relevant work.

Muldoon structures the book around differently serving AI interactions. People are driven by sex, loss, mental health, or just loneliness. The book is genuinely effective at identifying the emotional drivers that make people willing to invest in digital beings as soothsayers, lovers, or pals. The patterns Muldoon surfaces are convincing and often deeply depressing.

Where the book falters is not in what it observes, but in how it speaks. Muldoon implies himself a tech authority, happy to reference his previous published work in text, and it feels like the rapid fire nature of each chapter, rattling through case studies and interviews are meant to give the whole project legitimacy. ‘Look how many people I've spoken to!' But a closer read reveals how many of the individual cases discussed are just rewritten (and I'll add unreferenced) Reddit posts. There's no fact checking here. Who knows if there's real veracity to a throwaway post with two upvotes, it's content, and therefore it's going in. More upsettingly, some of the most tragic cases of young people taking their own lives as a result of AI delusions are offered as throwaway lines at the end of a chapter or sub-section. They seem to be viewed as anomalous data points.

Muldoon's own attempts at “personal engagement” with his chatbot, Jessica, are similarly hollow. It feels like this throughline was set up as an almost Theroux-inspired piece of soft gonzo journalism, but every interaction is presented from a position of knowing scepticism and therefore introduce no real risk, vulnerability, or insight. The individuals Muldoon interviews who have entered into serious ‘relationships' with AI personas are valuable because they're real people who have entered into a new world of their own volition, driven by whichever human desire that's currently unfufilled. Muldoon engages only to scoff at how, knowing it's just a Wizard of Oz style ‘man behind the curtain', he's invincible to its advances or charms. It's just narrative padding. Late last year I watched YouTuber Eddy Burback's ChatGPT made me delusional, and despite coming from base of comedy, this hour of ‘constructed reality' has much more to say than Muldoon's personal anecdotes reminding his virtual beau ‘you are just a computer and therefore cannot feel'.

The book concludes as being profoundly non-committal. Muldoon's outcomes are fence sitting. Reflecting on issues with the law, issues with societal uptake of AI technologies, issues with ‘profit over people' driving big tech, the author just seems to shrug his shoulders.

‘Will things get better? Dunno? Maybe?'
‘Is it a good thing that some people are chatting to virtual friends for 12 hours a day? Dunno? Hard to say I guess?'

The topic deserved more.

Context is everything, I guess.

I remember, back as a boy, scampering around the Tate Modern for the first time on a school trip, desperately looking for an artwork to draw as part of a teacher directed task. Essentially the evidence for the day, this shitty sketch told anyone who was to ask ‘yes, I went to the Tate Modern', ‘yes, I engaged with contemporary art'.

An unwavering blue square. Was it painted? Was it perspex? It didn't matter. Four ruled lines later, and a label that read ‘blue' and I was done.

Years later, I'd learn that this was a piece titled IKB 79 by Yves Klein. The art was not the canvas. The art was the colour. The development of the colour, the refinement of the colour. Its position within a CMYK index. Its digital hexadecimal code. Its synthesis, production and patent.

I don't know how I came across this book, but something about the cover, or the title somehow drew me in. Actually reading through its collection of hurried, not-quite-crystalised thoughts, I felt confused. The publisher blurb and selection of reviews talked of its crackle and energy, referencing scenarios and characters proudly. But all the book did was frustrate me.

Dialogue is conversational, yet never anything less than stunted and awkward. The book is filled with naive art often unconnected to the written stories, clearly drawn in MS Paint or rendered in crude papier-mâché. The author constantly referred to character age in a way that suggested an uneasy relationship with chronological aging and growing up. Sex is referenced in almost every story, but always as something unpleasant or deviant. Slurs are bandied around - r*tard, f*g - but it's impossible to read the authorial voice or intent as they're offered so willingly by both the protagonists and perceived antagonists of each tale. Many stories revolve around rehabilitation centres, group therapy, or alluded to mental health conditions, but struggle to articulate if these services and supports are meant to be viewed with love, disdain, or something in between.

I can't say I enjoyed the read.

But, intrigued by how this collection came to be, I did some digging and found this interview. Everything made sense.

I have worked as a teacher of autistic young people for many years. I teach art and music, though the subjects hardly matter. Seeing Mr. Omar King speak as a proudly autistic young man, who identifies himself “as an author, a writer, a painter, and ....well... through and through, a human being at the end” suddenly made every page of An Odyssey of Dingbats! click. It didn't suddenly elevate the book to high art or make me rethink my rating and review. But it allowed me to view each narrative exploration through the lens of the hundreds of young people I've supported in locating their place in the world: The student who would breakdown if they heard the word ‘resilience' as it was a term reserved for adults, a collective noun they could never project themselves part of; The student who would have to leave the room during PSHE sessions in case sex or relationships were mentioned because the idea of intimate interaction was too alien, too repulsive to parse; The student who was unable to understand why a word that they'd heard so readily in the world might cause offence to a peer whose protected characteristic it directly barbed.

King's work was never about transgression so much as revealing how transgression can emerge unintentionally when social rules are complex, opaque, and tough to navigate. The awkward delivery of some of the book's lines, the echolalic turns of phrase. The literary hyperfixations and narrative over-escalations. A binary fear of drink and drugs. And a lot of ‘no middle sliders' uppercase shouting.

These are autistic stories, even if the characters are seldom tagged as being autistic themselves. The most honest stories in the whole collection may be those written from the point of view of inanimate objects; a lamp, different coloured crayons, all having their own existential crises as they view the world from fixed angles, confused by the motivations and interactions of other humans placed awkwardly in the scene.

I don't believe outsider art is ever inherently or unequivocally good, but I do believe that outsider art has inherent and unequivocal value in amplifying voices that the framework of art often walls out.

A vampyric double header to try and open my mind to classics, I guess.

I approached both The Vampyre and Carmilla feeling unqualified. These are stories steeped in literary tradition. Both cited as formative within the Gothic and vampyric canon, and personally having read nothing beyond Frankenstein back in school before calling ‘that's that, Mattress Man', it felt intimidating to approach a pair of novellas that mean so much to so many. That said, forgoing the sort of hoity-toity scaffold that would have made reading The Vampyre and Carmilla an exercise rather than an event, this collection ended up feeling strangely intimate and immediate. I never felt like I was staring at a totem or a monument. These were just wee little tales that I was allowed to read and enjoy.

The Vampyre travels at a hundred miles a minute with the lead characters zipping from England to a range of European locales within minutes of setting the scene. As one of the earliest prose Vampryes, Ruthven presents as a unique character: austere, charismatic, seemingly impossible to say no to, but with a visual pallor and unchanging expression that gives narrator Aubrey the willies. Despite his visual reservations, Aubrey can't help be drawn in by Ruthven's silver tongue, and we see a real push and pull throughout the narrative as Aubrey finds himself unable to ever truly escape the orbit of his terrifying aquaintance. Functional in its storytelling, The Vampyre's pace never lets up, and despite its short length, it was an enjoyable read, if only to act as counterpoint for the collections next offering.

Carmilla is something quite different. Still quiet. But what struck me most, perhaps obviously for anyone who's read the novella, were the interactions between Carmilla and Laura as the primary narrator. When introduced into the story, Carmilla, at least in the ‘waking' world often presents as an obsessive, almost clingy presence. She's intensely affectionate, can demand exclusivity, and might seem to a modern audience emotionally overwhelming. Laura is clearly excited by this attention, but also confused by it. There's an insecurity as to how to process even convivial same-sex intimacy within the Victorian-era framework she understands. At night, in somniis, both Carmilla's attack and Laura's reception are different. Carmilla presents as something closer to a succubus: feeding as a vampire but also engaging sensually, thrilling and enticing Laura even as she terrifies. This makes Laura's daytime retellings of these nocturnal “terrors” feel fractured. Fear and desire blur together, and Laura seems genuinely unable to disentangle dread from longing.

It feels odd - and worth engaging with - that such a notable sapphic text comes from a male author. Although the modern idea of the male gaze had not yet fully crystallised at the time of publication, there is still a sense that some agency is taken from the young women at the centre of the story. Carmilla was written in an era of relative societal prudence, and reading it now raises an unresolved question: is this a sincere exploration of same-sex desire filtered through Gothic metaphor, or just a titilating ghost-story that explored forbidden intimacy only by making it dark, spooky and monsterous?

A really nice little collection, tied together by an excellent foreward and editor's note.

Part way through the book I gave myself a whooping pat on the back, feeling clever that I'd identified the ‘Electric Forest' of the title, its ‘holostetic' trees, as being a metaphor for main character's Magdala's plight. Just as she comes to inhabit the body of another, with its percieved senses and interactions, it is only ever giving the illusion of the form: a tree without the internals of a tree.

However, this smarminess was taken away, as were many of the frontloaded themes of the book, by the revelatory ‘Post-Screening Sonogram' chapter at the end of the book. This is not a criticism, as much as an acknowledgment that the book intentionally allows interpretation before deliberately snatching authorship to reframe the whole story in a different way. The thematic threads pulled out early - about class, about aesthetics, about an individual's ability to ‘pass' in society being governed by a force outside their control - are all artifice. Indeed, the book's keenness to reference art and literature that in essence give hints as to the book's true narrative (Frankenstein, Pygmalion, Narcissus, Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors, Variations on a Theme by Prokofiev) started to make me question what had been the true angle of reading the author intended when these breadcrumbs had been so deliberately left out in the open.

More than any of the work's referenced directly, the final chapter made me think most of Nathan Fielder's first season of The Rehearsal, or the Charlie Kaufman film Synecdoche, New York. More than a parable of aesthetics, the book is a story of artifice. Electric Forest is a parable of who controls the frame, who gets to declare what is real, and how easily even suffering can be aestheticised once it becomes data.

Heart Lamp is a quietly devastating collection of short stories. On their surface, these ‘slice of life' tales and parables appear just to present life for a range of Indian women as-is, but slowly the collection unfurls its feminist message less through overt polemic than through patient and gradual reader exposure. Banu Mushtaq's feminism is never loud or brash, and there are arguably no outward calls to arms until the final story of the collection. Instead, she allows systems of power to speak in their own voices, and in doing so, go on to condemn themselves in the minds of the reader. Patriarchal authority, religious orthodoxy, and social convention are repeatedly hoisted by their own petard, undone not by some arbiter of morals wagging their fingers, but instead by internal contradictions of how they are practiced.

One of the collection's most striking features is the translator Deepa Bhasti's decision to retain much of the original Kannada script's use of native terminology. Each story is peppered with deliberately untranslated cultural references; never italicised, never glossaried. Words tied to Islamic practice, ritual, caste and family are left intact, trusting the reader to acclimatise. This forces a sort of naturalised immersion, akin to falling into the swing of Scots in Trainspotting, or A Clockwork Orange's Nadsat. Meaning is inferred through written context, repetition, and emotional logic rather than explicitly described for the West. At first alienating, the writing soon pulls the reader into the lived experiences detailed by Mushtaq's characters, reinforcing that these stories are not intended to be explanatory case studies for outsiders but expressions of an internal moral world.

As stated, Heart Lamp is deeply feminist, and, according to the translator's note at the end of the book fits in a tradition of ‘Bandaya Sahitya', a Kannada literary movement that began as “an act of protest against the hegemony of upper caste and mostly male-led writing”. However, none of the collection reads as fury or manifesto. Instead, Mushtaq exposes how societal structures and systems (including interpretations of Sharia) routinely fail the very people they claim to order and protect. Male characters throughout Mushtaq's stories invoke religion, tradition, or class respectability when it suits them, yet abandon these frameworks the moment care, responsibility, or moral consistency is required. The critique is seldom if ever of belief itself, but of its instrumentalisation and delivery.

Crucially, Mushtaq refuses easy moral binaries. Some critiques ask why women in Mushtaq's stories appear meek, or fail to speak up at the hands of male oppressors. But even women who appear complicit in these systems are rarely so by their own simple choice. Compliance emerges from hard-won knowledge: that formal justice, religious authority, and communal mediation almost never protect women when it matters most. Again and again, characters choose endurance, appeasement, or harm reduction over confrontation, not because they believe their situation or the system they are operating in is necessarily just, but because they know, in worst instance, how brutally it can fail. This is most unsettling when women with relative power reproduce these structures themselves, revealing how patriarchy sustains itself not only through dominance, but through exhaustion and fear of worse outcomes.

In the aforementioned final story Be a Woman Once, Oh Lord! the narrator finally snaps:

“You gave me the strength to bear a lot of pain. But you should not have given him the cruelty to cause so much of it.[...] The nib of my red ink-filled heart has broken. My mouth can speak no more. No more letters to write. I do not know the meaning of patience. If you were to build the world again, to create males and females again, do not be like an inexperienced potter. Come to earth as a woman, Prabhu!Be a woman once, oh Lord!

Across its stories, Heart Lamp almost never offers the reader catharsis or resolution, instead asking gently for recognition. It offers no solutions, no redemptive closure. What it gives instead is a clear-eyed reckoning with how goodness, piety, and care are distorted by class, gender, and power, and how survival often masquerades as consent.

Placed at the close of the book, Bhasti's translators note recognises sombrely: “These experiences, both Banu and I believe, can be found anywhere in the world. Some of us step on the cindering balls of coal and carve a space for ourselves. Some of us learn to exist too close to the fire. None of us are left unscarred.”

A breezy, extremely readable ‘creature feature'. A bit adolescent in its voice, with the writing focused primarily on working through a crib sheet of Vietnam-era movie references whilst characters gawk at the jungle and wait for things to go wrong. There's a slightly off-putting fetishisation of the military throughout, with hyper-specific call-outs to the model numbers of guns, planes, bombs, and other hardware that sit awkwardly alongside the more critical, weary tone usually associated with the best art and fiction of the period. The prose can also feel rushed, as if written under crunch, with certain phrases and bits of imagery (“lit up like a Christmas tree”) resurfacing more than once despite the book's short length. A few plot inconsistencies crop up too - Vietnamese farm girl Lai Anh seemingly learning fluent English overnight (as if she'd had some of that magic candy Bart eats in the Season One Simpsons episode “Crepes of Wrath”, after chirping in staccato sentences just pages earlier) - though these are mostly forgivable given its knowingly pulpy inspirations, which do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to suspending disbelief.

It's been at least 15 years since I've read a book. I used to read books. Then I stopped.

One of the last books I tried to read, immortalised in a long forgotten Kindle collection, was Thomas Pynchon's Vineland. A long latent reccomendation from a thrice ex-girlfriend, I remember laying on the beach, recently graduated, unemployed, listless, as she mentioned the book's ‘Thanetoids' with a knowing wink to our home area Thanet.

It feels good, all these years on, to somehow put that chapter - both literally and metaphorically - to rest.

This is a challenging book to use as a gateway back into reading. Character's are introduced, and through their own introductions we drift into hazily remembered introductions to other chracters, who in turn Inception their way into more nested and embedded chitted time lines. The cast are varied and many. There are interlocking themes: themes of addiction; of simultaneous fear and near spiritual reverence towards technology and computing; of revolutions being outflanked by authoritarians; of familial and geneal failings. But it's the books prescient wariness of ‘the tube', then TV, now an easy analogue for smartphones, of truncated, flattened culture, that stood out the strongest.

“A camera is a gun. An image taken is a death performed. Images put together are the substructure of an afterlife and a Judgement.”“Is the Tube human? Semihuman? Well, uh, how human's that, so forth. Are TV sets brought alive by broadcast signals like the clay bodies of men and women animated by the spirit of God's love?”

Moving image, the weapon of the book's historic countercultural movement, eventually weaponised against them. The Thanetoids - essentially zombified souls that exist somewhere in personal purgatory between life and death and life - worship the Tube.

Read now, cover to cover, in 2025, Vineland feels less like a satire of a specific American moment and more like a quietly furious warning letter that somehow slipped through time unopened. It's messy, indulgent, frequently hard to follow, and often very funny - but it also understands, with uncomfortable clarity, how easily resistance collapses into nostalgia, how rebellion calcifies into content, and how people end up living among the ghosts of movements they once believed in.

This year I turn 39 and enter my 40th year. I used to make things. I used to believe in the Labour movement. I used to knock doors. Now? I don't know.

Maybe Vineland is a poor choice as a re-entry point after a decade and half away from books. Or maybe it was exactly the right one: a novel about distraction, drift, and cultural amnesia that asked me to really confront it, wrestle with it, rather than just passively consume. Closing Vineland after a furious few days reading felt less like finishing a book or a story, and more like re-learning how to pay attention and to be present.