My #31daysofhalloween challenge 2026

Well well well, it is that time of the year again and once again I have been keeping up my yearly tradition of watching at least 31 horror movies in the month of October i.e. at least one per day, and a bunch of other horror media which I will get to. So here is what I’ve been watching and what I thought.

First off, The Movies:

1. Mononoke the Movie: Chapter III - The Curse of the Serpent
Third and final part of the film spin offs from the Horror-Anime with an incredible art style and absolute horror vibes for days. If you love dazzling art direction and Asian culture then this is a big rec from me, though I think you’d need to watch the first couple at the very least or start off with the series which is excellent too.

2. Dr. Terror’s Gallery of Horrors

Eh, American made anthology very much in the spirit of the Amicus EC comic adaptions but nowhere near as good. Roger Corman would have been ashamed to put this one out.

3. Daughters of Darkness
Man. Don’t you just hate it when you watch a UK cut of a Euro-erotica with all the fun sexy bits cut for the BBFC? I’m sure there’s probably a much more fun version with all the good stuff left in kicking around somewhere hopefully with subtitles but this ain’t it chief. Would not recommend.

4. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy
Meh, not bad if you like Jump Scares. As an Irish film maker I honestly wish I could get behind Cronins work a bit more but this is passable dumb fun, not bad by any means just not much to write home about.

5. Exit 8
If i had a quid for every horror movie based on a computer game to come out this year that I've seen that is about a protagonist dealing with the anxieties of prospective fatherhood id have two quid, but isn't it weird that it's happened twice? Pretty good tho, made me want to play the game too so fair play.

6. Frankie Freako

From the absolute legends at Astron-6, this is some top tier comedy horror for lovers of practical effects and a penchant for 80s nostalgia. It might not be quite up there with Father’s Day or Psycho Goreman but its still pretty good by anyone else's standards. I had a blast and I defy anyone who has a love of the whole wet-puppets trope in classic pre CGI horror not to have an absolute blast.

7. Monster House

Childrens animated horror that is in the vein of The ‘Burbs but for kids. The CGI animation might be sowing its age a bit but if you have preteens and you want something you can all watch for a bit of crack in the spooky season (and you’ve already rinsed the Henry Sellick / Laika ouvre) then you can do a lot worse. Good voice cast too.

8. Obsession

I actually missed this when it was out at the cinema and having now seen it, yeah its dope AF. Not quite my bag but I can see why the young’uns all like it and the fact that it has done gangbusters are the box office is a good sign for the health of the genre. Great central conceit, well executed, great turns by al the main cast (none of whom I think I’ve seen in anything before either) and gives you a lot to chew on after. Everything a good horror should be.

9. Perfect Blue

Rewatch of one of my absolute favourites by arguably the greatest mangaka / Anime director to ever do it. Brilliant. If you’re reading this and you’ve never seen this then what are you even doing with your life?

10. The Ugly Stepsister

Gloriously twisted darkly humorous body horror take on Cinderella. I have to say this got pretty fucked up in certain parts, like it made me gag a little and I’m hard as f’ing nails in general so be warned.

11. Let the Wrong One In

Irish Vampire comedy horror. Pretty good, there’s a bit where a guy takes a Vampire’s heart out with a Hurl and shouts “Up The Dubs” as he hits it like a sliotar into the sunlight to kill the vamp. Also notable for one of the last performances of the late great Anthony Head.

12. The Empty Village

I always like to hit a new watch from each continent, today I'm doing a new one from Ghana. Not bad. It is a bit odd though that it has the name of the production company being imposed in every frame (i'm guessing that's for copyright, even though its free to watch on youtube).

13. Mārama

Māori gothic horror which is not technically out in the UK until the end of the year but I would consider worth keeping an eye out for. As someone with Māori kin its great to see the culture being depicted on film and this is some excellent work.

14. Hokum

Rewatch for me, another top quality Irish one from the team that brought us Caveat and Oddity, which presumably did well enough that they got the budget to hire Andrew Scott from Severance and numerous other big American TV shows for the lead. Nice wee spooky Irish yarn with an intriguing mystery plot and great creepy vibes all round.

15. Nosferatu

Again, a rewatch but I hadn’t seen it since release and had a fun time introducing it to my family, who all had a great time with it. Totally forgot that its technically a Christmas film and probably should have waited til then, ah well…

16. An Evening Of Edgar Allen Poe

Vincent Price monologing 4 Poe stories. No filter, just Price on gull scenery chewing form and the raw text. Essential for fans of either.

17 PVC-1

This years visit to South America. A Columbian horror-thriller based on the true story of a woman who has a bomb collar attached to her neck by terrorists looking to extort her family. A solid 85 minute shot as a 1-er that never lets up the tension for a single second. Genuinely terrifying. Available to watch for free on Youtube here.

18. Good Boy

From the people that did Skinamarink, which I thought was really interesting but respected more than I enjoyed. This is a horror film about the cutest wee dog experiencing the death of its owner as a haunting and all from the perspective of the dog and has some of the best animal acting you’ll ever see. Very well done and if you’re a dog owner yourself this will fuck you up.

19. Die Säge des Todes (aka Bloody Moon)

Prolific euro-erotica director Jess Franco doing a slasher thriller with some inventive and amusing kills and a plot that is actually a lot smarter than I give it credit for. Like I thought I was just watching a stylish, cool and very horny late giallo but there were a couple of twists and turns that I genuinely didn’t see coming.

20. The Boxer’s Omen

Really weird bit of spooky Hong Kong action-horror. Very very Asian, to the point where its basically nonsensical if you’re not immersed in southern Chinese Buddhist magick lore. That said, it is an incredibly fun ride with some cool action, fever-dream visual sequences and really gnarly gore effects, all practical obviously with it being from the 80s. It’s about a triad-adjacent kick-boxer who has to become a Buddhist monk to fight demons, and that is about all you need to know.

21. Jennifer’s Body

A rewatch. I haven’t seen this for a long time and I always remembered liking it, nice to be confirmed. The scary bits are scary, the body horror is suitably squicky and as a dark, blackly comedic teen drama, aye it rules. The two leads Amanda Seifreid and Megan Fox are quite believable as two girls locked in a toxic friendship, Diablo Cody’s dialogue is just consistently sparkly and funny. I’m glad it has obtained the cult classic status and recognition for its brilliance it richly deserved all these years.

22. Lost Boys

Continuing my binge of classics that I’ve not seen in a bit nor written about here before, the Joel Schumacher Teen vampire horror comedy 80s classic Lost Boys. I have a good mate for whom this is his post-party hangover comfort film and I get it. Great story, lie Jennifer’s Body it could almost be in the Buffy The Vampire Slayer universe, looks great, had vibes for days and the soundtrack is pure gold.

23. The Witches of Eastwick

Another 80s classic I can’t say I’ve seen since the turn of the century, another Hollywood 80s cinema classic with a packed cast and tons of style. Based on a novel of the same name the writing is clever, the dialogue endlessly quotable and there are great turns from all involved. Good fun.

24. The Lair Of The White Worm

Ok, I might have written about this before in one of these lists but I will never tire of this film, or any other Ken Russell film I’ve seen. Considered one of his lesser works, this was one of the first of his I ever saw (actually probably the first, I’m sure I saw this before Tommy) this is a charming tribute to the classic British technicolour horror tradition and a banger horror comedy in its own right. Did I see anything in the film this time that I hadn’t seen before? Eh, no, but it does have a lot of 90s Amanda Donahoe running around being all sexy and evil so IDGAF.

25. Tremors

Probably the first time I have seen this since I was a kid. This is just a very fun tribute to the classic American creature feature tradition, might be my favourite Kevin Bacon performance too. Constantly inventive with how it scares you, and keeps you on your toes in the sense of characters (that are all very well realised and you genuinely care about) getting themselves in and out of monster related scrapes. Tight, efficient storytelling and again just a lot of fun.

26. Arrebato (aka Rapture)

Art house movie-about-movies from the late 70s. It’s barely a horror except in an existential sense up to the last act. Kind of like 8 & ½ if Fellini was a junky. It’s a study of how one can allow oneself to be consumed by obsession, whether that is with an addictive substance or the process of artistic creation. A dark but nonetheless sincere love-letter to the medium of cinema. I liked it a lot, even if it wasn’t literally scary.

27. Necronomicon: The Book Of The Dead

Oh, a Brian Yuzna project I’ve not seen before. And it’s in one of my favourite formats the classic Amicus-style Portmanteau. And it’s also loosely based on HP Lovecraft stories, which capture the vibe and imaginative cosmic horror of the originals without Herbert's weird sexist and racist peccadillos. Yeah, very enjoyable and goes harder on the gore and practical SFX than it needed to, like this was 1993 essentially the peak of all that stuff before the CGI blight on cinema got underway, like had it been a year or two younger it would all look like dogshit now.

28. Clayface

Wee trip to the pictures for this one. Loved it. As amusing as it is that it's set in the Battinson DC Universe and that Colin Farrell, Paul Dano and Barry Keogh are also out there in this universe doing villain stuff, really you can watch this as a stand-alone and be very entertained. Didn't catch any DC Easter eggs / references or even nods but I did catch the odd one to other stuff I adore like Darkman being the big one, a little Theatre Of Blood and a bit of Yuzna in its creative DNA.

29. The Devils

The long awaited 4k restored full directors cut is now finally with us and it is truly a glory to behold! The story, based on true events in 1630s France this is a historical gothic about the intersection of sex, religion and political power that hasn’t been available in its intended form, with one particular scene considered the philosophical, moral and theological heart of the entire project by the director finally restored with no small thanks to the efforts of the critic and friend of the director Mark Kermode, who did a live introduction at the premiere showing I attended. This will go down as one of my best cinematic experiences of the year.

30. Necropolis

A sexy blonde multi-breasted reincarnated VVitch returns to stalk the streets of New York in the 80s. Set in the then-contemporary “The Deuce” era when Times Square was full of junkies, pimps and their ho’s it feels like there’s some sort of social commentary being attempted here amongst the fan service but its hard to tell exactly what’s being said and it lacks the raw scrungyness and charm (not to mention the incredible soundtrack) of Liquid Sky which did much of the same things better and on a much lower budget. Still, its fun and thankfully short at a tight 77 minutes.

30. Vampire Hunter D

I decided to finish the season by binging a couple of old OVA Anime Horror classics beginning with the legendary Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s Vampire Hunter D, first time watching in quite a few years and its as good as I remember. This has big nostalgia vibes for me because I recall that first wave after Akira when all these Japanese cartoons for adults with swearing, blood and titties started hitting the west and that style to us was what anime was supposed to be. Anyway, this was great, the plot is ridiculous and the dialogue is very silly but the vibe and animation are still fire, gorgeous all these years later and now basically impossible to replicate since the generation of people who could do hand drawn cell animation have decidedly aged out of the industry and life itself. It’s wonderful a capsule of another time.

31. BAOH

This one I haven’t seen. Based on the Shonen manga by Hirohiko Araki who would later become world famous as the creator of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure this is essentially an extended origin story for a series that would never get made. Its good fun, basically The Gyver but with a lot more gore and body horror. The art, character design and animation are all in that classic 80s-90s OVA style so much of what I’ve said above about D goes here too.

So that’s the 31 day film challenge.

Other than that I have been reading Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudon, the basis for the Ken Russell film see above which is actually a work of non-fiction but considering the subject matter very season appropriate. Its great, a long non fictional work, interdisciplinary before the term was much of a thing in academia it is both a work of history that also includes long discursive chapters on theology, philosophy and the psychology of mass hysteria. That took me longer than anticipated so the only other book I managed was Chuck Tingle’s first non-Tingler Camp Damascus which while not quite having the sophistication or polish of his later sci-fi horrors is nonetheless excellent and you can see in it the promise of what was to follow.

I watched all of the latest season of Haunted Hotel, a cool little animated horror comedy which I thoroughly enjoyed. I also saw Poor Devil another animated comedy horror series about the antichrist living in present day New York. It was pretty good, lots of contemporary satirical humour and the penultimate episode about the downstairs neighbour who is barely in the rest of the series is one of the finest single episodes of anything I think I’ve seen all year. And of course it wouldn’t be October without a new Mike Flanaghan project and this time he’s doing a modern adaption of Stephen King’s iconic debut novel Carrie but a very loose one that’s been brought up to date to the age of social media. It was cracking, the long 8 hour miniseries format gives it a lot of time to breathe and really flesh out some of the characters that were a bit one note in the original, like the bully and Mrs White are given enough material that even if you still hate them you actually completely get who they are and why. I can see the King purist super fans hating it for all of that and while I have an issue or two of my own with the ending for the most part this is one of the best things on TV all this year so far.

And that was my October. I did see a bunch of other non-horror related stuff and made it to the theatre a couple of times too, which I may write about again in the near future. Until next year, happy spooky season.

Why I hate the Wachowski’s Cloud Atlas

Boke

I didn’t start this blog to dunk on anything or bitch about media I dislike. Generally I try and support stuff I find interesting and share obscure things from the nooks and crannies of culture that I like and use what little of a platform I have here to shine some light on stuff I like and would like to see getting more support. Today’s post will be a rare departure from that. I’m not doing this because the thing under discussion is spectacularly bad to the point where it needs a major takedown but because in discussing why I don’t like it I think there’s something interesting to be said and possible lessons to be taken. 

Not that one

Cloud Atlas is a big screen adaption of a novel of the same name by the author David Mitchell, and that’s the author as opposed to the guy who played Mark on Peep Show and has published at least one book of nonfiction which may or may not be as good as Business Secrets of the Pharohs and of whom I confess I am a bit of a fan. Different David Mitchell they just share a professional name.

Anyway, I very rarely will not finish a film I’ve set down to watch after the first couple of minutes but the time I tried to watch Cloud Atlas was one of the rare occasions where I tapped out. I don’t recall exactly at which point but it felt like ages in and I have not attempted it again.

I had been looking forwards to it too. I had generally liked the Wachowski sister’s work. As a devotee of Alan Moore Thought I had been disinclined to like any V adaption but with a few criticisms and caveats I ended up liking their version and consider it one of the few “good” Moore adaptions. I loved the Matrix and have time for the sequels, inferior though they are, and consider The Animatrix some of the best cyberpunk media. I also liked the book which I read in one go on a particularly long bus trip from Sheffield to Belfast. On paper the two seemed like a good fit. They’d done complex sprawling sci-fi before, surely they could do this?

Well, no. As much as I hate people who are real purists over source material in this one instance I am very much that guy. My fundamental gripe with it is that they abandoned the structure of the books, the sextette structure which to me seemed like the whole point of the novel was ditched to make it more palatable and they hollowed out a lot of the important stuff in favour of the least interesting most superficial parts. 

If you’re not familiar with the book or don’t know what a sextette is, let me explain.

A sextette is a structure often found in classical music but not elsewhere. If you have an interest in classical and have a favourite composer look it up, they may well have one. What you have is a piece composed of six distinct parts that can sound quite different or similar but with a different lead instrument but have consistent musical themes that connect them all as a singular piece. 

What David Mitchell did was to go, cool, what if I did a book like that? A single book composed of six parts that each feel like their own thing, of different genre, written in a different style like they’re from different authors with some loose connective tissue in the story but consistent themes of enslavement, exploitation and captivity. The book starts with the first section of which you get the first half, then the first half of the second and so on up to the sixth part which plays out in its entirety, finishing followed by the rest of the fifth then the fourth and so on backwards until you get the second half of the first section, finishing where it started. I don’t know if that’s a common way of arranging a sextette in music or Mitchells innovation but that’s what the book is and it’s a cool and interesting read. He very much frontloads the significance of the structure with the title, in the book The Cloud Atlas Sextette is a piece of music that appears in different parts of the text at crucial junctures, the second story being concerned to some extent with its composition.

The Sextette of stories also go backwards and forwards through time. Part 1 is set in the 19th century, part 2 later in the early 20th, and so on till we get to 5 which is set in the cyberpunk far future and the last section in its post-apocalyptic further future.

The film ditches the structure altogether, this is its cardinal sin.

They are, aye

To illustrate why that’s an issue I’ll now bring up the Peter Jackson Lord Of The Rings Trilogy as a point of comparison, specifically the second two films. In the Two Towers and Return of the King novels there's a two book structure, first book follows everyone except Sam and Frodo around Rohan and Isenguard, mostly Aragorn Legolas and Gimli but eventually Gandalf, Merry and Pippin as the first group catches up with them and get filled in on what they've been up to. Book 2 is all Frodo, Sam and Gollum as they approach Mordor over roughly the same timeframe as the previous section. In The Return of the King, same kind of deal first book everything else in the War of the Ring from the fall of Isenguard up to the survivors of the siege of Minas Tirith heading off to the Black Gate for the show down with the forces of Mordor. The last book then picks up with the ringbearer party where they left off at the end of The Two Towers and follows them to mount doom and beyond to the end.

Now do the films stick to that structure? Nah. It’s fine on the page but it there wouldn't be any point doing it that way on film. The films flit between what's going on at a given time with the two or three different groups of characters, sometimes using those to set up little mini cliff-hangers etc. It’s all good because in the language of cinema it makes perfect sense.

In the film Cloud Atlas, like in Jacksons The Lord of The Rings, they ditch the structure in favour of skipping between the stories and in this case it doesn't work, because you're unmoored in time skipping between six discreet stories with minimal connection to each other up and down the shared timeline instead of between things that are happening at around the same time across different locations. It’s a constant random churn. Many critics of the film find this not just needlessly abrasive to the senses but literally confusing. A common observation of the film even from its defenders is that it is hard to know what is actually going on without having read the book. That to me is a fundamental flaw. You shouldn’t have to know the source material of a thing that’s been adapted to parse it. If it doesn’t stand on its own two feet as an art-object in itself then what is the point of it? A film that been adapted from something else can choose not to follow the source and have a certain ambiguity that the source makes explicit and still be good, great even. I’ve not read it but I have read that in the novel Under The Skin the motivations of the alien MC are much les subtle and its got a much more explicit message. Does that mean that the film is “solved” since reading the book answers a lot of the questions and dispels the ambiguity cultivated by the film? Nope, the film is its own thing, the mystery adding to the vibe and its purposefully just showing you the events and letting you draw your own conclusion. Or another classic example would be Blade Runner, in the novel Phil K Dick has no time for moral ambiguities, Batty and Crew are canonically baddies and less than human, Dekkard gets gaslit into thinking he might be a replicant for a couple of chapters but definitely isn’t. In that sense the book is imo worse than the film. People can make sense of these films on their own terms. They aren’t just literally confused by the editing.

Another thing that I don’t like is that the things in the books outside the structure that connect each of the stories are very loose, subtle and intangible. These are brought to the fore in the film and what was subtle made explicit to the detriment of the themes. Some of the characters in the different timelines share a birth mark which seems to imply that they are either related or are reincarnations of each other. The book doesn’t dwell on this point or its significance, the film makes a big deal out of it. It was never what the book was supposed to be about. When you see the film being described like on IMDB or something it always gets brought up.

I feel like all this fuckery was only done because if they'd kept something like the original sextette structure in the screenplay it would have been deemed too weird to ever get out of the slush pile even with that cast and the pre-Jupiter Ascending Wachowski sisters behind it. I could imagine an indie film doing this and it being deemed too “Art House" just on that basis. The production of Block Busters is a lot more regimented and formulaic than would allow for something like that. Without the structure they had to make the film about something, hence the over emphasis on that loose connective tissue. This was just about the end of race swapping actors not being considered really bad crack so we get Tom Hanks in Yellowface because of this.

Could it have been better had they stuck to the structure? Wellll…. I’m not sure that a feature film would be the right medium in the first place and can’t help but think that it might have been better as prestige TV. In a show they could say do it as six episodes in two parts with each having the first two parts of the story then episode 4 finish the second half of part six and five and the rest in descending order. They could keep the essence of the book by having the different sections being shot in a different style even different film stock and all that like retro film producers do, eg Mandy, The Love Witch, The Lighthouse and the films of Mark Jenkin. The section with the composers in black and white, the spy stuff like a 60s American TV, doing The Orison of Soom-Yi like a cyberpunk anime and preferably in the classic OVA style, the bit in the old folks home like a 90s British TV drama etc. I reckon the structural weirdness would be something a modern prestige TV watching audience would be up for now in a way that film goers of the early 2010s wouldn’t have.

I don’t know if that will ever happen. These are just my thoughts. 

10 Great Fantasy Stand Alone Novels (Part 2)

Legend by David Gemmell

Ok so now we’re getting into the territory of what one might consider “proper fantasy”. Gemmell in his day was the big don-dada of straight up two fisted action adventure fantasy. While he did not write long interconnected series many of his books share a universe with the others. This one, Legend is but the first in a whole series of the  world of the Drenai, who are a sort of western coded people (though not specifically Greek or Germanic or even Celtic) and takes place at a pivotal moment in their long resistance to the incursions of the Mongol-coded Nadir tribesmen (which thankfully manages to dodge a lot of the dodgy orientalist tropes that one can get what fantasy decides to dip into that tainted well for inspiration).

It’s the story of the siege of Dros Delnoch, that last outpost of the Drenai on their northern frontier holding the gap between two great mountain ranges, a choke point that the Nadir must overcome before then can pass into the lands of the Drenai and is told from the perspective of the defenders.

So far so very so very much what one might expect from a fantasy novel, its Helms Deep but a whole book. What makes it special is what Gemmel himself was bringing to it. By all accounts he was a very genial and kind man, but he was a big dude and while he cut his teeth writing as a stringer on the local beat in his home town of Hastings, he was also a bouncer and grew up around a lot of other big tough guys for whom violence was a normal part of their lives like his beloved step father Bill. There’s a lot in here about masculinity of the decidedly non toxic variety. Also, I was not aware of this the first time I read it but on hearing about it made perfect sense; when Gemmell was writing Legend he had had a cancer diagnosis and legitimately didn’t know if this was going to be the only novel he would ever get to write. It was essentially a form of therapy, the siege of the fortress was him resisting the threat of a potentially life ending illness. The characters in the book, particularly the titular Druss The Legend (based on his stepdad) were his imaginative actualisation of the fighting spirits of those people and the lessons they’d taught him over the course of his life deployed against the existential crisis he was facing down.

Luckily for us, he got over the cancer and though he would die relatively young at 58 of heart disease he would go on to give us some absolute bangers, Echoes of The Great Song, Dark Moon and my favourites the 4 part Rigante series, the first two of which are his take on the Arthurian mythos. So if you read and enjoy Legend there’s a whole body of work of admittedly variable but mostly high quality fantasy for you to get stuck into. But Legend is the best place to start. If you are only ever going to read one David Gemmell book this is very much the one.

Weaveworld by Clive Barker

When horror authors jump genre they tend to bring a certain flavour with them. This fantasy novel from
the horror author Clive Barker who created Hellraiser and whose shorts inspired Candyman and The Midnight Meat Train definitely have a lot in them that is of the macabre and horrific. It’s a portal fantasy about magical beings hiding in a world contained, as the title suggests within the warp and weft of an intricately patterned carpet. Set in the Liverpool of the 80s, the shadow of Thatcherism and the radical kick back against that in that city with the poll tax riots and a Trotskyist faction running the city council add a lot of grit and a profound sense of place and moment to the world building. Our protagonists are all decidedly working class heroes, one of the villains seems to be the embodiment of capital and another is a bitter old cop.

Barker has also never been one to shy away from the intersection between the horrific and the erotic and while used sparingly there are definitely some passages in this that are on the spicy side of things so be warned, this is not for kids or anyone who isn’t comfortable with that type of thing. You will likely squirm at one scene in particular, no spoilers but suffice to say that it’s a memorable depiction of the monstrous feminine specifically the mother aspect. What you should get out of this is again a really good story that rollicks along and keeps you guessing as it unfolds with some great flights of fancy and Barker’s elegant and evocative prose.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Clarke came right out of nowhere back in the early 00s with Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrell, a historical fantasy about rival magicians set in early 19^th century Britain. It was a darling of the critics and genre fans alike, one that both the literary world and genre fiction readers could really get behind, like a latter day Doris Lessing. If I had read it myself instead of just watching the apparently very accurate and faithful TV adaptation it might be on here, but I have not. I did read her long anticipated and much shorter though no less lauded follow up Piranesi which came out only a couple of years ago making this the most recent book on this list. Clarke unfortunately for everyone is a long term sufferer of CFS and only produces a book every decade or so, so it behoves us to appreciate them when she does, and appreciate it I did.

Piranesi is the journal of a man with a dodgy memory who finds himself in a huge Gormenghastian mansion which is half full of sea water and has its own tidal system referred to only as The House. As far as he’s aware, this is it, him and the mysterious and enigmatic figure referred to as The Other who shows up occasionally to speak to him are the only two living entities in the entire universe. The human remains of the dozen or so other people he finds around The House are the only other people that ever have existed. Without giving too much away, obviously we as the reader know that there’s something not quite right going on there, particularly as The Other makes to us what are clearly ominous references to places and things from the real world. It’s a short book and it gives up the goods in a nicely paced and well executed fashion so if any of that has you intrigued enough to look into getting a copy and having a look for yourself, you’re in for a treat.

Jerusalem by Alan Moore

Alan Moore is for my money the greatest living writer at least in the English language. After blazing a trail through the comics industry becoming the undisputed king of 80s/90s writers he, after a lot of provocation and bad deals took a sickner with that whole side of the cultural sphere and concentrated on writing fiction. 

His first novel Voice of The Fire was a psycho-geographical exploration of his home city from the first human settlers in that part of the world through to the present of 1997 when the books was written, which is essentially him writing in first person as he takes a walk around his neighbourhood. As great as that was, and indeed worth reading in its own right, it was but a taster for Jerusalem, in which he draws on local history, his own family history and such knowledge as he has gleaned from his own esoteric investigations (the man is a fully accredited practicing IRL wizard) he restates the case made in Voice of the Fire for Northampton city, and specifically his local district The Burroughs being not just the geographical centre of Britain but also of the world in general, indeed of life the universe and everything.

It’s a weighty tome, the longest book on this list by far and its not always an easy read. It is one which will sometimes require careful study to get your head around certain parts of it, especially the section where he’s in character as Lucia Joyce and goes full on Finnegan’s Wake with the prose (no one will blame you for skipping that section tbh), but it’s eminently readable and rewarding for those prepared to pull up their big boy smarty pants and make the effort. It is about a lot of things, the nature of time and reality itself. The Nietzschean notion of eternal recurrence, the degradation of life under what once were important and thriving urban centres by neoliberalism. Its about art and the necessity of making art, ever if its not something you’ll make a living off and its just for you (aka why I keep writing this fucking blog that nobody reads lol). It is rich, textured, funny as hell and if you’re in the right frame of mind for it may rewire your consciousness and cure your todesangst, if that’s a thing you’ve had to deal with in your life.

..........

And so we come to the last and by no means least book on this list. A few years ago I would 100% have had Coraline by Neil Gaiman on here and be talking about it right now but since all the stuff came out its just like nah. As much as the books themselves are all great and whatever weird shit he got up to in his private life very little of it ends up on the page, unlike other problematic authors, looking at You Marion Zimmerman Bradley (and yes I did read a pirated copy of The Mists of Avalon out of curiosity and after knowing what we know now about her, and fuck me as great as that book is in the abstract it is really hard going when you have the full context, genuinely uncomfortable and squicky the way horror fiction is meant to be and this was definitely not written as a horror novel). So yeah, Coraline, American Gods, Anansi Boys, Good Omens, which he did with Terry Pratchett are great stand alone fantasies and read them if you must but please for the love of god buy second hand, pirate or better still, shoplift a hard copy from your local non-independent big book chain retail store if you have to. Whatever it takes, just do not legally purchase a physical or digital copy because even if his numerous accusers are just money grabbing bitches who are exaggerating to fill their pockets (which funnily enough is exactly the same line taken by Rolf Harris about his accusers) if he only did the stuff that he’s admitted to himself, that cunt does not need nor deserve penny one of any residual sales from his work from now until the end of time. 

So with that out of the way, what to do? Like I do love Terry Pratchett and technically all his books in the Discworld series are stand alone but I’ve done a whole other long essay on here about him and his work which you can find here. The TL:DR being, if you’ve not read any of his stuff before, Small Gods, Guards Guards!, Wyrd Sisters or The Wee Free Men for younger and particularly female readers are all good.

Which brings us to someone who I am a massive fan of, haven’t written about on here before and at least to the best of my knowledge hasn’t fucked any of his twenty-something unpaid domestic servants and what I feel is the best jumping on point for him and his whole schtick

Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie

Joe, aka Lord Grimdark, writes much like David Gemmell, good straight up two fisted violent action adventure fantasy. For many people he’s the go to after they’ve read all the Game Of Thrones books. He, Like GRRM does morally dubious complex characters against a complicated and dark setting animated by a black humour (and he’s actually capable of finishing a series once he’s started so there’s that…). There are some horror elements and implied science behind the fiction so it's at least New Weird adjacent. I actually first heard of him through a hit piece by a highly strung traditional fantasy author kvetching about the turn away from fantasy with a firm Christian moral basis into the modern trend of nihilism. I can’t dig up the exact quote but it was something along the lines of: imagine if at then end of the Lord Of The Rings it turned out Gandalf was just as much of a dick as Sauron and only wanted the one ring destroyed so he could be the undisputed power in the land himself and Aragorn was just some useful dupe that he’d installed, to which my immediate response was That sounds dope as fuck, sign me up, and I have been on the Abercrombie train ever since, binging through everything he’d had out up to that point and reading every new book of his as they’ve released.

Joe writes in something like the traditional fantasy style, the main series set in the First Law universe is a trilogy, followed by three stand alone books set in other parts of the same shared world peripheral to the Union, the main setting of the first three, followed by a trilogy set a generation after and starring the children of some of the characters from the previous books and recurring characters from the stand-alones. As a fan and disciple of terry Pratchett he has purposefully written each book so that they really could stand alone and be read out of order, even the individual parts of the two trilogies, but probably better if you don’t tbh. No no, my recommendation is that if you just want to read one of these books to get a flavour of the world and see everything that Abercrombie can do as a writer go for the first of the three stand alone books Best Served Cold. Aside from a very light spoiler for some stuff at the end of the trilogy that doesn’t actually matter there’s nothing in here that’s going to take away from reading the previous books if you go back, hell one of the main POV characters from that trilogy shows up in one scene but its written delicately around it so you wouldn’t actually know unless you’ve read the previous books, but if you have it’s a lovely little Easter egg for you.

This is Abercrombie doing his take on the revenge thriller, it's his Count of Monte Christo or Kill Bill. It starts off our heroine(?) Monza Murcatto being defenestrated after seeing her twin brother murdered in front of her and left for dead by the Duke Orso for whom she’d been formerly employed as one of his top generals. She survives and gathers a rag tag bunch of misfits to seek her revenge, including a few characters you might have come across in the previous trilogy such as Caul Shivers, who shows up in basically every book in this setting aside from the first one and goes through one of the wildest character arcs in genre fiction, with this being the one he’s in the most and has his most pivotal moments. It also has fan favourite Nicomo Cosca, another memorable and well written character who runs the gamut from anti-hero, to hero to primary villain-antagonist in another of the books, though in this one he’s on the side of our main characters and very much on the hero part of that arc.

It’s a great meditation on the nature of revenge as what starts off as a righteous quest for vengeance gets increasingly murky as the collateral damage stacks up and Monza herself begins to doubt the validity of what she’s doing but also hammers home that once you start off on a certain path it can be very hard to get off.

This is Joe on absolute top form, the competence in his character work, world building and technical writing is off the scale. In the later part of the book there’s one of the most cleverly written sex scenes you’ll ever read, not just for the smut but for how he handles character perspectives. The action and battle sequences are characteristically visceral. There’s a great heist sequence. It’s just a good meal well served and you’re in the hands of a master.

And apparently there's talk of a film of this one in the works so if you want to get hipster points by getting in early and reading the novel so you can brag about it now's probably a good time :)

 

So there you go. If you’re looking to branch your reading into fantasy and don’t want to dive head first into a big chonky multi part book series that only starts getting really good 4 books in or whatever or may or may not at the time this is going out ever come to a conclusion, looking at you Patrick Rothfuss and GRRM, this should hopefully have given you something to chew on and possibly inspired you to take a peek at something listed above. I may or may not come back to this topic for there are indeed a few books of which I’m fond that would be considered stand alone fantasy that have been bubbling under and might have been in here if I’d read them more recently. Or I might do something about completed series / trilogies for people that liked A Song Of Ice and Fire and want something similar to get into while enduring the long and possibly unending wait for that next book. Lets just see where the mood takes me. Anyways, I hope you’ve enjoyed this, peace out and if you’ve read any of these and want to comment or especially if you’ve actually picked any of these up thanks to me do leave a comment or share, it would mean the world to me.

10 Great Fantasy Stand Alone Novels (part 1)

This is a thing I often see coming up on forums and Facebook groups dedicated to the fantasy genre. When one thinks of fantasy you tend to think of trilogies like the iconic Lord Of The Rings, big expansive series like The Wheel of Time, A Song Of Ice and Fire, Malazan The Book of The Fallen or even CS Lewis’s Narnia books which run to seven books. For people brought up on the genre who love it there’s nothing better than plugging your mind into someone else’s for an extended period of time, watching the world building unfold and getting nerdy about the lore. For many people though these big commitments are a little much of an ask, newer readers who might just be feeling their way into the genre, people who might not have as much reading time and many other people might just legitimately want a good stand alone book that can show off what the genre can do. 

So the question does often come up, and I’ve answered it enough times that I’ve settled on a list of ten solid rec’s that at least one of them should appeal to anyone who just wants a “one and done”. Some of these might be part of larger series or share universes and characters with other novels by the same author but are perfectly fine to read in isolation or out of sequence. I’m also going to give a short explanation of each, what people are looking for from a novel is going to vary so this is in the spirit of a fair heads up and much as why I rate them.

Some of these books are in my opinion among the best writing of any genre. They’ve ideas that will fire the imagination, prose writing comparable to the best of any literary fiction and some contain a sophisticated commentary on fantasy and the world in general.

So, in no particular order these are the first five:

 The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson.

This book is one cited by the noted fantasy author Michael Moorcock as Better Than Tolkien. In the context of the 60s when that statement was made, performatively dunking on the undisputed king of the genre was a spectator sport indulged in by the young revolutionaries working in the field who wanted to kick against the thing that very much defined the genre. It was a provocative statement then and will have many up in arms to this day, think Jonny Rotten’s “I Hate Pink Floyd” T.

But actually, the man has a point. Its interesting to compare with The Lord Of The Rings since they’re contemporaneous, the first editions of it and The Lord Of The Rings each dropping the same year, and they’re both original works of fantasy fiction that draw from the same well, the western European mythological canon and dark ages history. Whereas Tolkien takes inspiration from these works to create the complete world of Middle Earth with its own mythos, history, languages and even geology, what Anderson does is to read The Book of Invasions, Ulster Cycle, Mabinogion, Norse Mythology, the Sagas, Fairy Lore, The Tales of King Arthur etc. and treat them as a consistent and co existing Extended Universe and writes his own new story set at the end of the dark ages. As someone brought up on this stuff, to me it rings very authentic, it has the style, the feel and inhabits the morally ambiguous universe as the old pagan sources. Its also just a cracking read, much tighter than The Lord Of The Rings and many another which would try to imitate it.

It’s also of a certain historical significance in that it might be one of the earliest of the seminal genre works to be inspired by Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung, we’re talking a good decade before Earthsea and two before Star Wars. I’m not quite sure if those were direct conscious influences or just convergence from working with similar resources along the same lines but if you are familiar with The Heros Journey, the idea of archetypes and specifically The Shadow Self from Jung you’ll see that in it.

So yes, if you’re getting into fantasy and have read and enjoyed Tolkien and looking something else that might scratch that itch, maybe give it a go and see if you come to the same conclusion as Moorcock and myself. Conversely if you have read Tolkien and maybe weren’t so fussed and would prefer something similar that’s a bit darker and spicier this could be something you’ll enjoy.

 

The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien

 This is some peak mid 20^th century Irish literary fantasy by one of the great unsung heroes of Irish literature. Flann, real name Brian Nolan, was a Dublin man who ran in the same literary and drinking circles as Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh. Though overshadowed by them in posterity in terms of the quality and brilliance of his writing he was very much their equal, arguably Joyce’s true heir. The problem is that he didn’t have such an expansive literary output, or not for his fiction anyway, as he was a journalist and wrote a daily column under the name Myles Na Gopaleen which took up most of his creative energies and was in all fairness one of the most popular and widely read in its day. He did leave us with a couple of short but excellent books and The Third Policeman is the one I would consider the most accessible. It’s a novella length story of a strange young man who is what we might today term a sociopathic incel that after plotting and carrying out a robbery with an associate finds himself in circumstances stranger than himself as he wanders into a distorted surreal version of the Irish countryside. Its kind of funny but also kind of horrifying. I’m not sure how appealing that sounds but I think the best way I could sell it is that it is beyond trippy, a fairy story for adults that will do things to your head you would normally need chemical assistance for, which is interesting since as far as we know O’Brien never indulged in anything more psycho active than the sup, which he was very into by all accounts. It counts amongst its fans Alan Moore and Blindboy Boatclub, the latter of who’s mother prays to the shade of O’Brien’s brother on his behalf for his continued literary success. It’s a short enough and quick enough read that I don’t want to give up the goods re the plot beyond what I have but lets just say that one of the most memorable sequences involves a dialectic of fractal infinity in the form of a series of little boxes each a perfect copy of the other and each fitting into the other perfectly until we reach the material limitations of the tools by which reality is perceived and manipulated. I mean if that alone isn’t appealing, I don’t know what to tell you.

 

Wizard Of the Pigeons by Megan Lindholm

This is an urban fantasy (and one of the seminal works that brought that subgenre into popularity) by the author who is much better known for writing epic high fantasy under her other pen name Robin Hobb. As Hobb she’s one of the big dogs of the modern fantasy genre along with George R R Martin, her Realm Of The Elderlings series in particular being one of the ones rec’d to people who liked ASOIAF and want something else to get stuck into, and its actually finished. This earlier work is as good as any of her better known stuff and has many of the qualities that make her epics great. She’s a great world builder and in this instance she captures her home city of Seattle of the early 80s.

If you’re familiar with the Terry Gilliam film The Fisher King you’ll be in familiar territory (like “very familiar” to the point where I’m surprised that no legal action was taken or even mooted) in that it’s an ambiguous fantasy whose phantasmagorical elements might just be the hallucinatory subjectivity of a psychotic unhoused person. The character writing is strong, the titular Wizard is a compelling and tragic figure who we feel and suffer along with as he uses his “cunning insight” (making him a true Wizard in the original sense of the word, a “Wise-ard” / wise man rather than someone in a pointy hat who can cast spells) to navigate the urban jungle much as you do with Hobb’s protagonists over the much longer stretches of her blockbuster series. There’s a strong anti-war subtext in that the wisdom the character has was hard won through being away to a traumatising war experience, a life hard lived ever since and deep connection to the psychogeography of the city.

 Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay

 Kay started his career in fantasy at the top as an associate of and worker for the Tolkien estate who would become with his own work one of those along with Tad Williams who would quietly revolutionise the genre in the 80s by bringing a critical and modernist sensibility into high fantasy. This particular story inspired by IRL cultural genocide (Kay cites Translations by Brien Friel, a play about the culture wars over the Irish language) it has one of the great central premises in the genre. An evil wizard – conqueror casts a spell to erase the name of an entire people from the collective cultural memory in a fit of pique after a particularly bloody act of defiance by them sees his son die in battle. Our heroes are essentially nationalist revolutionaries on a quest to rise the people in rebellion and break the spell so that the name of their country; ‘Tigana’, can be heard once again. You cannot tell me that if Bibi had wizard powers he wouldn’t be pulling this type of shit, like the Zionist lobby are doing essentially this with their insistence that “Palestine” was made up by the USSR in the 1960s. It’s a good rollicking fantasy yarn but this premise gives it thematic heft often lacking elsewhere in the genre. It is complex. Our “heroes” will sometimes do things that are of dubious ethicality for the cause, make great sacrifices of themselves or just fuck other people over. One of our POV characters becomes tragically enamoured with the antagonist, as some subjugated people do with their oppressors. Also, as someone who has studied modern history and was introduced to Carlo Ginzburg’s work in my 101 class at uni the bit where it segues into The Night Battles for a little bit was just *chef’s kiss*.

The Iron Dragon’s Daughter by Micheal Swannick

A human child called Jane is taken to the land of faerie. A changeling, she becomes a child slave labourer in a place that makes the titular Iron Dragons. She will escape and eventually pose as a student in the faerie high school, which bears an uncanny resemblance to the modern high school of the late 1980s, gets a bit into some bad habits, as you do at that age, sex, partying, shoplifting, you know, typical teenage stuff. She’ll even go beyond that to Faerie university to do STEM (Alchemy) all guided by the ineluctable and sinister force of the Iron Dragon. 

We’re into some very deep and for my money well executed 'fantasy as social-commentary' here along the lines of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. The Dragon factory is a shitty ununionized sweatshop, not unlike the “Special Economic Zones” in China or labour conditions in general in the tiger economies of South East Asia that were coming into greater public knowledge at the time, the high school beauty queen gets to be the top girl in her year before being Wickerman’d at homecoming, The Iron Dragon becomes the ambient corruption and environmental degradation innate to capitalist development, he has the local pixies doing their own Guerra Sucia at one point just so he can stock up on his fossil fuel reserves.

So this is clever stuff and as with the other books I’ve recommended, the clever world building is only there to add to and accentuate what is a cracking story and a good read. Taking Jane past the usual fantasy-bildungsroman trappings into adulthood is a nice touch, the relationship between Jane and the Dragon Melanchthon is one of the most interesting and memorable in literature. Its one I would be judicious in who I would recommend it to since it appears as a YA / kids book at first but really isn’t. What it is is extremely compelling and sometimes challenging, I don't want to give away the ending or anything but lets just say that there's a sequence late on which is reminiscent of the end of 2001 in being pointedly abstract and "trippy" in both the literal transportative sense and the other.

This book is also typically my answer to "if you could see any novel made into TV or a film what would it be". I would personally love to see it done with a load of animatronic puppets representing the faeries, like literally getting Jim Henson's creature workshop and Cosgrove Hall in on the production and shooting it on the sort of analogue video tapes they did all the latter's Narnia and The Borrowers adaptions to give it that '80s kids TV retro feel with only Jane and maybe the various incarnations of Testigus and the Baldwynn played by actual people. At least that's the way it comes through in my head when I'm reading it and maybe yours too if you think that sounds at all cool or interesting.

………………………………………

So that is all for the time being. The next one of these will include my favourite living author’s masterwork along with more of the best fantasy writing of modern times.

2025 My Year In Stuff

 

2025 was actually a pretty good year just for getting through some good media. Working at the Ulster Museum as I had been for the most of it meant having to up my game in terms of good nonfiction and broadening my knowledge of stuff in and out of my wheelhouse. We’d some cracking TV and quite a good year for movies and gigs. So, in no order:

Gaming: Basically the same as last year, still playing Streets of Rage 4 a fair few times a week, Balatro, Pool and Slay The Spire daily. The two new games I got into, Deltarune and the new Shinobi from the guys that did SOR4 I enjoyed up to a point but hit skill walls where there were certain bits that were too hard for me to get past and hence didn’t finish which is a bummer but meh, what can you do? 

Podcasts: Again, aside from the ones I’m still listening to from last year, The Only Podcast About Movies which is co presented by Matt of Extra History. It’s him and another guy who works in industry so you do get a reasonable level of analysis as well as their opinions and they cover a good range of stuff, their crack is generally decent too.

Theatre: I actually did make it out to the theatre a fair bit. I always say that I’m going to but rarely do, this year though I did genuinely get to see a good few shows. I saw Shame Show again, a locally made queer comedy with some very clever production. I saw Imelda May’s one woman show The Mother Of All Behans, based on the autobiography of Kathleen, mother of Brendan, Dominic and Brian. Ottille – another one woman musical about the Northern Irish blues singer Ottille Patterson. The Tunnel, a troubles era prison drama which was part of he Feilé was brilliant as well as was In The Name Of The Son, based on the life of Gerry Conlon and almost entirely focused on his life after prison, his struggles with mental health and slide into drug abuse. This was written by old family friend, former blanket man and scourge of Sinn Fein Ricky O’Rawe. I got to see pretty much all of these with my Dad so it was fun having a wee boys day out with him.  And for my birthday my sister took me down to Dublin to see The Book of Mormon with a couple of our mates.

Youtube: Yeah, aside from the stuff I’ve been keeping up with since last year there’s not been much to write home about. For whatever reason the algorithm seems to want to kill the long form video essay, a lot of the better of which have up sticks and moved to Nebula. Lindsay Ellis though has dropped a few bangers which have made their way back to her channel. The Beatles one is essential watching imo, as is her one on Miss Rachel and the flack she’s been getting from the Israel lobby. The video essay space has been very light on Palestine, only Bad Empanada and the Chapo Trap House podcast seem to have been consistently good on the issue. Sad to see.

TV: There’s been a bunch of live action series I have yet to get around to but really should. I’m part of the way through IT: Welcome To Derry and its been great so far. Pluribus and Silo both look fantastic but aren’t on services I sub to so it is going to take me a minute to get them sorted. Andor season 2, as much as it felt a bit rushed it was still fantastic, arguably the best thing in the whole franchise since the first couple of films. Something that came out at the start of the year and most people, including myself until there now, have probably forgotten was the disney MCU continuation of the Netflix Daredevil series with Charlie Cox and Vincent D'Onofrio as Kingpin, in this iteration essentially as a Donald Trump figure. It was actually great and a worthy addition to the earlier series. Another thing I did see was The Chair Company. Between that and the movie Friendship Tim Robinson has been on a roll this year and long may he continue. It’s a toss up between that and series 2 of Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal for best live action show of the year. And I have finally got around to watching all of the original Twin Peaks and I’m well into The Return. I can see why some people consider this the GOAT, I’m not sure I am one of them yet but I’ll reserve judgement until I finish the whole thing.

Anime / Western animated series: Have finally got around to Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood and tbh it was good but a bit too kiddyish for me. I have worked my way through a lot of obscure older anime from back in the day and damn, so much of it was absolute forgettable tripe. A couple that I did like were the old OVAs Ellcia a kind of high-seas fantasy and the urban horror fantasy Phantom Quest Corps. As far as newer stuff, we didn’t get anything new from the bit hitters of recent times, Hosoda, Shinkai etc. got a new Rose of Versailles film which was incredible, if you like shojo anyway, I caught the new Mononoke films (no relation to Princess Mononoke) which are as gorgeously animated as they are creepy and weird. Ponoc (or Continuity Studio Ghibli as I like to call them) give us The Imaginary, possibly their best project yet. Disney give us a whole slew of new Star Wars Visions, some direct continuations of the stories from season 1, all by some of the biggest anime studios currently going. Dandadan season 2 continues the standard set by the first ne, which is great to see since it fucking rocked. My only criticism is they didn’t keep the opening theme and the new one isn’t quite as good.  

The best thing though was 17-26, a compilation of stories by Tatsuki Fujimoto, creator of Chainsaw Man and Look Back. Honestly, this was incredible, unmissable stuff even if you’re not that into anime, every story is different and has some of the lushest animation and bravura story telling you’ll ever see. The other big stand out of the year in anime for me was Nukitashi: The Series. This was some of the most bizarre stuff I’ve ever seen in my entire life and really just reminds me of the good old days and everything I got into anime for in the first place. I’m not sure how exactly to describe it, it’s a sex comedy, borderline hentai but like a parody of the genre and not even that sexy, yet weirdly compelling. 

Western animation, we got The Mighty Nein, another show from Critical Role who were responsible for The Legend of Vox Machina, which we also got the last season of this year. Just solid fantasy hijinks. Creature Commandos, a suicide squad but with horror monsters set in the new DC Gunn-verse was a lot of fun, reminds me of the good old days of the 90s Vertigo era. Unknown Side-effects from the team that did Scavengers Reign was an absolute belter. The new Invincible season continues to be great too. 

My favourite series, perhaps unsurprisingly, was the second season of Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake. While it didn’t quite have the shock of the new of season 1 the animation quality, the cuts and turns of the plotting and the stream of consciousness visual storytelling were absolutely mind-blowing. A constant treat for old fans and new beginning to end, and good news is that we’re apparently getting more, a movie and 2 shows, a BMO centric one for babies and Side Quests, which is basically them going back to basics and doing stuff in the style of the early seasons, i.e. non arc plot single stories. We also got a short from Adult Swim called The Elephant made by a bunch of the OG adventure Time team, Penn Ward, Rebecca Sugar and Pat McHale which was almost three self contained minis where each handed the last panels off to the next with no context and let them riff on what they saw.

And yeah, I did see K-Pop Demon Hunters and it rules, not quite my bag but I can see why the kids all love it. Dogman might be the funniest thing I’ve seen all year. Predator Killer Of Killers was a lot of fun, one of the nest action films of the year animated or no.

For me though the best western animated feature was Memoir Of a Snail, the latest from ozzy stop motion animator Adam Elliott. A gothic, tragic, funny and sometimes heart-breaking story about two twins separated by the child services system and their subsequent lives. Its pretty dark in places but one you can definitely watch with older kids.

Movies: God damn, this has been a very good year for films. We’ve had a bumper crop of great horrors including Sinners, the best black Marxist vampire horror musical crime drama you’ll ever see, and not just because its likely the only film to blend those particular genres. Weapons, Together and 28 Years Later were all excellent. We got two great takes on the classics, passion projects by their respective directors with Robert Eggers Nosferatu and DelToro’s Frankenstein. I got to see 3 cracking new(ish) Irish horror film, All You Need is Death (came out 2023 but only got to see it on streaming this year) which was scored by one of the Lynch lads from Lankum, Fréwaka and An Taibshe two creepy atmospheric elevated folk horrors which are also fine additions to the cannon of Irish Language cinema. My favourite though was Bring Her Back, the second effort from the Philippou brothers. There were bits in that that had me squirming in my seat, and I’m hard as fucking nails and generally don’t get effected like that, so fair play to the lads.

Palestine features quite a lot in the cinema as one of the big things happening in the world at the moment. Even the new Superman seemed to be throwing digs (I personally think it was initially more about the Ukraine but as things unfolded during the production it leant into it). In fiction, To A Land Unknown was basically an update of Steinbecks Of Mice and Men but with Palestinian migrants in Greece. Palestine 36, a historic epic about the origins of the conflict was excellent, a few minor liberties with the historical accuracy aside. We had the documentary No Other Land which did a very good job of showing the general maniacal shittyness of the settlers and the IDF who defend and support them and the day to day bullshit Palestinians on the West Bank have to put up with. The Encampments, which was about the solidarity movement in the states and te sea change in public opinion that seems to be happening there based on the campus protests.

Other than that, The People’s Joker I really enjoyed but I feel like I need to rewatch, its basically the DC villains’ origin story as a trans narrative and its fun as hell. I’m Still Here, a Brazilian film, a true story about the family of a politician, a sitting senator who becomes one of The Disappeared by the fascist Junta in the 70s and their long quest for justice. The Return, an adaptation of the last sections of The Odyssey with Ralph Feins as Odysseus himself was classy good stuff. Pillion with Harry Melling and Alexander Skarsgård and Babygirl with Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson both did some excellent work bringing BDSM relationship dramas to the big screen with an element of realism conspicuously missing from tripe like 50 Shades of Grey. Cool OSTs on both of those two, particularly the latter. Bugonia is maybe my second least favourite Lanthimos film that I’ve seen but that’s still a pretty high bar and definitely a must see with a lot to say about contemporary society in the usual Lanthinmos bizarre style. Sorry, Baby will probably be remembered as the first of many masterpieces from its writer-director. As for: One Battle After Another, yeah believe the hype it IS that good.

Best new film, at least of the ones I’ve managed to catch so far was It Was Just An Accident. An Iranian films made by a dissident director who was banned from making films and had to shoot the whole thing in secret and smuggle it out of the country. And you can kind of see why, he does not pull any punches. A man who had been tortured by the regime for trades union activity thinks he has come across one of his torturers, by accident, chases him down and captures him with the intent of getting revenge. But, as the man swears innocence he begins to doubt himself and sets out on a journey to find others who were captured with him who might be able to positively identify him. A comedy of errors ensues that takes him all over Tehran with his drugged captive in a box in the back of his truck. It’s great vital film making, as much a black comedy as it is a thriller.

I also saw a fair few older films for the first time that I really enjoyed. The Blaxploitation classic Black Caesar is an absolute banger. Haneke’s Time Of The Wolf was bleak AF in the best possible way. The best film I saw all year might well be the French Resistance classic from the 1960s Army Of Shadows. Based on a novel by a resistance veteran it has a grittiness and a lack of romanticism about it that chimes with what I know about the real history of the time period.

Music: I’ve got to some cracking gigs this year, Managed to knock Laibach off the bucket list when I was over in London, and finally got to see clipping. in Paris (in The Moulin Rouge) touring their latest cyberpunk concept album, where I also saw Violent Magic Orchestra doing their new album in a tiny basement which was frankly the perfect setting. Nice bunch of lads too (and heck out their Boiler Room from Osaka, its unreal). I saw Max Cooper again in Dublin and at Bangface where he headlined the Sunday again and yeah, his music and his AV work are up there with the greats, your Aphex Twins and Autechres. Speaking of which Autechre played the Mandela hall and between them and the support who all played some absolutely sick wonky IDM and breakcore this was the best night of music in Belfast this decade, easy.

Other big gigs, Charlie XCX, fuck the haters I thought she was great. Kneecap and The Fontaines DC – great seeing Irish music repping hard on a world stage. The whole thing with Kneecap and Bob Vylan’s attempted cancelling and prosecution by the genocide propaganda complex was like the current generations big pop culture rebellion moment, Beatles “bigger than Jesus” or the Sex Pistols on Bill Grundy or the God Save the Queen banning, or the 80s metal Satanic Panic do not have shit on this in terms of the literal seriousness of the politics implicit in the whole goings on. 

One gig I did miss unfortunately was Billy Woods, as it was in Dublin and that was the night at the start of October where the weather was completely mental. Shame because along with clipping. Billy is probably the best in the game at the moment and Gollywog is some of the rawest horrorcore. Similarly, Brian Ennals and Infinity Knives new joint A City Drowned In God’s Black Tears is another masterpiece of raw alt-industrial hip-hop. FKA Twigs latest Eusexual, dark, clubby some tough edges to it and still kind of poppy.

It's not been a bad year for punk, I saw The Circle Jerks and The Descendants in the Limelight here back at the start of the year. I got listening to The Chats album which I only got hearing this year though it’s from last year. Lambrini Girls LP was a class bit of modern Riot Girl. 

Favourite LP of the year though was Kae Tempests latest where he’s essentially come out as trans-masc after identifying as non-binary for the last couple of years and that’s pretty much the theme of the album with Tempests usual fiery poetic delivery. If you can hunt down a bootleg of the Glasto set its really worth seeing.

Books: I read a fair bit of good genre fiction, Alan Moore’s The Great When being the most literary and the highlight. Joe Abercrombie’s The Devils, basically a Catholic Gothic Suicide Squad set in an alternative middle ages, was fun. I read the whole Empire of The Vampire trilogy, and cheesy, derivative and all as it is it was also very enjoyable. I did also read a fair bit of serious non-fiction. I read The Wretched Of The Earth and Said’s Orientalism as well as the whole of Jonathan Bardon’s History of Ulster. I read Dead As Doornails, Anthony Cronin’s readable and insightful memoir of his time in mid 20th century bohemian Dublin, which in turn inspired me to read Pat Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger and Other Poems. 

Finn Dwyer of The Irish History Podcast’s pop-history book A Lethal Legacy was another absolute delight. It tells the story of modern Ireland through a series of True Crime Podcast-esque murder stories and is as recommendable to the layman as anyone in academia. Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism's Forgotten Radicals by Maurice J. Casey I picked up after hearing him on Dwyer’s podcast talking about the book and again, its in the sweet spot between pop-history and the serious stuff for academics. It takes in feminism, the Russian revolution, Trotskyism Vs Stalinism, queer history too. And it’s a good read to boot, the author puts a lot of himself and his journey as a researcher into the text, much more so than one usually gets. 

Similarly, Kincora: Britain's Shame - Mountbatten, MI5, the Belfast Boys’ Home Sex Abuse Scandal and the British Cover Up by Chris Moore has a lot of Moore’s own story of his decades long involvement with the case and is, I personally think, essential reading for anyone with the slightest interest in the conflict here. Beyond conspiracy theory, this is conspiracy fact and it is harrowing.

Much more fun was the collected EC Ray Bradbury stories published and collected by Fantagraphics. This is pre code when comics production was basically the wild west and they would occasionally cut corners by ripping off stories from the more respectable sci-fi magazines assuming nobody would notice. Bradbury though actually did read EC horror comics and was a little surprised to come across his own work. Instead of getting mad and getting the lawyers involved he just wrote them and said he actually liked what they did with it and maybe in future they could cut a deal and he’d let them do his work with his official endorsement and name on the cover if they credited him and sent him a reasonable remuneration, which they did and the stories are an absolute joy, not surprising considering that they’d the likes of Wally Wood, Joe Orlando, Jack Davis and so on on art duties. 

So that was 2025, or at least the highlights. There was a bunch of stuff I didn’t quite gel with or like over much. Or just thought was fine. There’s still a bunch of stuff I’ve not got around to that might well have made this post if I’d got to it. 2026 is shaping up to be a good one too and no doubt if I do another one of these at the end of next year you’ll be hearing all about Arco, Hamnet, Hades 2 or The Voice of Hind Rajab from me. I really hope we keep up the good run of horror films and The Bone Temple lives up to the last one. I’m also hoping to get a lot more stuff written for this blog. So, here’s to another new year, hope 2026 brings us happier times because it is grim out there and that doesn’t seem to be letting up any time soon.

Reading order of The Discworld: My Take

 

We are back once again with a question that I see asked quite frequently on social media that I have answered maybe dozens of times, often enough that I think its about time to get my thoughts in order here so I can just direct them to this post rather than just type more or less the same thing every time. The question in this instance being one of where to start with the Discworld book series by the late Terry Pratchett.

It’s a simple question but the answer is a little more complicated than one might imagine. Before I get to that though I will say a little about it and my relationship with the series for the uninitiated.

 

The Discworld is a series of comedic fantasy novels written by Terry Pratchett from 1983 until his untimely death in 2015. If you were around nerd culture any time in the early 90s to the time of the authors passing you’ll know exactly what I’m on about, the books were everywhere. Easons and Waterstones used to have them on prominent display in their respective genre fiction sections and would do deals on them to entice shoppers in. They were reviewed in the genre fiction press, SFX did every single one since it started publishing as did all the other speculative fiction journals of note and they invariably reviewed well. He put the whole genre of comedic fantasy on the map in a way that it hadn’t been and spawned numerous, often poor, imitators. The only place you didn’t really see giving him the love was in mainstream discourse. This was well before the mainstreaming of nerd culture, you’d see little about it on TV except the time Tom Paulin on late review called him an amateur for not using chapters, a quote which made it to the book covers.

 

I was a fan myself. I first got into them when I was 14, I tapped my friend David’s collection to take on holiday with me to Donegal and read all of them and the couple that I’d scored from the library. I would go onto read all of the ones published up to that point over the following years and got those out subsequently as they were released. I also read as much of Pratchett’s other books as I could get a hold of, his earlier sci-fi works like Stratra and The Dark Side Of The Sun where he was working out a lot of the ideas that would become the Discworld, his YA fiction, the Discworld themed pop-science books that he did with two professional science educators and may be one of my most formative reads in terms of how I see the world. I also got a lot of the ancillary materials, the Maps, David Langford’s guides and quizbooks, the art books by Josh Kirby and Paul Kidby, who did the iconic covers for the books.

 

So that is all to say that I feel qualified to answer the question, where to start and what order to do the series in.

 

The first thing to get out of the way in answering this is whether or not to do it in publication order. That seems like the obvious thing to do, yeah? If you’re a fantasy reader in particular who isn’t daunted by a big series and is happy to commit to something like that, you’ve likely done that with another series already. The thing is that the Discworld is not like conventional fantasy series in which there’s a consistent set of characters or an overarching narrative, like Wheel Of Time or A Song of Ice and Fire. The single thing that remains consistent between books is the setting, a giant flat disc-shaped world that sails through the universe on the back of four elephants which are themselves on the back of giant turtle. The books are all written to stand alone, though there are some sets of characters and locations that recur that I will be referring to as sub-series. There can be dense and intricate plots in each story, but the plots are ultimately there to serve the humour which is the main purpose of the books. The whole thing is an elaborate playground that is a sort of mirror of our world but powered by magic that allows the author to interrogate different elements of the social imagination for the purpose of comedic satire.

 

In theory then, you can literally read the series in any order. Even in the sub-series, you’re only getting minor spoilers, like if you have read any of the watch books after Guards Guards! you’ll at least know that none of the original 4 guardsmen who show up in the subsequent books are going to get killed by a dragon nor that Vetenari’s imprisonment is going to last.

 

Aside from that you don’t have to for narrative purposes, the other argument against publication order is that the first two books are not that much like the rest of the series, arguably worse (though I personally wouldn’t got that far), and people who might potentially enjoy the books what Pratchett gets into full swing could be put off by them. I personally think that’s fair as while I like The Colour Of Magic and The Light Fantastic (the former much more than the latter) they’re just objectively different to what the series becomes.

 

These follow the adventures of Rincewind, a Wizard who can’t do magic and Twoflower, the Disc’s first tourist. The first book ends on a literal cliff-hanger which is picked up immediately in the second, that’s the only time the series does anything like this. The Patrician and Death both show up and act out of what will become their character. There’s a lot of free associative high fantasy whimsy in the humour that won’t be a big feature of the books for long. They are mostly a riff on fantasy tropes, in The Colour of Magic the two main characters clip into our reality for a couple of pages, again the only time in the series anything like that happens (even the later books that feature Rincewind). The Colour Of Magic is also unique in that it feels like a fix-up, being made up of four short-story length sections (though as far as I know they were never published separately prior to the book itself). So not worse by any means in my subjective opinion, just different.

 

That said, there are two different groups of people that I would actually recommend doing publication order to:

1.      People who are already familiar with and enjoy the stuff Pratchett was riffing on and influenced by when he started writing the books, I’m thinking specifically Douglas Adams and Fritz Lieber, but also Micheal Moorcock, 70s/80s British humour in general, the early classics, i.e. Tolkien, Howard, Lovecraft etc.

2.      People who are going to commit to reading the whole thing, sight unseen. Maybe they’ve read some of Pratchetts non-discworld books or they just know themselves well enough to know that its going to be their thing. That and they’re happily cognisant of the issues the first couple in the series might present themselves with and will plough on regardless.

 

So, if not publication order, where then to start?

So, I have mentioned the sub series. Whilst some of the books stand completely alone and some are only connected thematically, most of the books are part of a sub-series which are set in the same location and/or have a recurring cast of characters. These may on occasion intersect with each other, its complicated. As I have said earlier, even these may be read in any order but I think it is optimal that you do actually do them in the order they came out as it is nice to see the characters and their situations develop and pay off over time. For that reason in my opinion the first book of one of these is one of the best places to start.

 

These are as follows:

·       Mort – this is the first book where the anthropomorphic personification of mortality, the grim reaper aka Death who shows up in nearly every book and SPEAKS ENTIRELY IN CAPITALS WITH NO QUOTATION MARKS LIKE THIS gets his own dedicated book. The titular character Mort is taken on as his apprentice, hilarity ensues. This is the start of the Death series.

·       Wyrd Sisters – while this is not the first book to feature the chief Witch Granny Weatherwax, it’s the first to be set in her home country of Lancre (which is kind of the Scottish Highlands analogue of the Disc but has Cornwall coding in there too, some adaptations give the residents West Country accents) and feature her coven. It’s a riff on Macbeth, but so much more than that.

·       Guards Guards! – This is the first book to centre the Watch, the police of Ankh-Morpork, the chief city of the Disc. It’s a lot of fun, some argue the exact point where the series goes from ‘Good’ to ‘Great’. It’s a fun mash up of police thriller / mystery, and high fantasy. One could argue that the cops being the good guys makes it copaganda and therefore ideologically suspect, I don’t disagree per sé but the take on policing and law and order in general is cynical and there’s enough nuance in there that it’s not that much of an issue, at least to me.

·       The Wee Free Men – This is the first featuring Tiffany Aching, a young girl who is set to become the witch or wise-woman of The Chalk, which feels a bit like the Discs analogue of the rural Home Counties area of England. As such it is witch-adjacent, Granny Weatherwax does show up as an advisor and mentor to the main character much as she does in her first book Equal Rites. That said these books are very much their own thing, Granny being there is basically an Easter Egg for the adults who have read the previous novels and have deigned to read this since it is actually the only series that is marketed as YA and intended for a younger audience. This and The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, the first Discworld YA and only YA stand alone, to my mind make for the perfect onboarding point for tweens to older teens, particularly those who have already read and enjoy a bit of YA fantasy. And it isn’t like adults aren’t going to enjoy these, the Tiffany Aching sub-series are good examples of what YA is and what it can do at its best.

·       Going Postal – This is the first of the Moist Von Lipwig books. It’s a bit of a departure as it’s the first non YA Discworld book to be divided into chapters. Its arguably part of a longer thematic subseries chronicling the Disc, or at least the part in proximity to Ankh-Morpork, undergoing a process analogous to our industrial revolution. Most of this takes place in the stand alone books but it’s a bit of a running theme in the Watch books as well as policing in the city gets progressively modernised by Vimes as it goes on. In this one the postal service gets overhauled by a former gifted and ingenious con man who gets roped in against his will by Vetenari. Moist is low key one of the best characters in the Disc and this is representative of the late stages and most mature portion of the run, some would argue its objectively the best written of the books I’ve listed so far.

 

So those are the first books of each of the sub series. You could also again start with the first books as Rincewind’s various adventures around the Disc constitute a series in themselves. He ends up getting a lot of the high fantasy “we need to stop the end of the world” shenanigans. Of the stand alone books, there are a few that I would consider good jumping in points. These are:

·       Small Gods – this might be the best book in the series, or at least a close second to Nightwatch which while great does come deep into the watch subseries and definitely rewards familiarity with the wider lore and is a good example of one you probably ought to leave until you’re already immersed. It’s Pratchetts most definitive philosophical statement as it deals with organised religion and is animated by his deeply held secular humanist beliefs. On the Disc the way that religion works, with it being a magical space powered by the element narrativium that permeates the universe and ensures that reality takes the shape of stories, if people believe in gods that brings them into existence and they become sentient autonomous beings with godlike powers, who mostly live in the great tower Cor Celesti at the Disc’s centre where they idly play something like DnD with the lives of the mortals elsewhere as depicted through the first couple of books and feed off of the faithful belief of their followers. Not so in the desert country of Omnia which is a violent and expansive theocracy, it is monotheistic and seeks to supplant all other faiths with Omnianism. You’d think their god Om then would be doing well, but the religion has been so ossified and calcified into the bureaucratic structure of the organised church to the point where there’s only one person left who has a genuine faith and he can only manifest as a small turtle. Now if you think that sounds very fedora tippy, nu-Athiest-y then you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. Pratchett was very outspoken in his advocacy for atheism back in the day and no doubt shared a portion of his fanbase with the 4 horsemen. Unlike them though he didn’t turn into a massive wanker the second 9/11 happened and cosy up to the American Christian right and their war of terror against the middle east. It’s a good time.

·       The Truth – This is one that could be considered in the Industrial Revolution series. These follow a loose format of: X industry / facet of modernity comes to the Disc, hilarity ensues. In this case its Journalism. This is something Pratchett was more than familiar with having been a journalist then press officer in his career prior to writing full time. It’s clever and quite fun, there’s an elaborate political thriller plot that is executed really nicely, its got one of the best cast of characters and while the main turns up later you don’t get one with the full crew like this again.

·       Monstrous Regiment – This is a take on the time honoured pop culture trope of the girl who cuts her hair to go join the army, as seen in popular broadside ballads over the last couple of centuries. It’s one I would recommend to anyone who is trans or gender non-conforming themselves as it is as clear a statement on all that as you could ask for since Pratchett himself passed before JK Rowling lost the plot and initiated a culture war and felt the need to weigh in personally on the issue. It certainly made for a firm rebuttal to those claiming on socials that he would have been a TERF. And it’s a good book on its own merits, feels almost like a Sharpe novel with a bit of a fantasy twist.

So, those are my recs as someone who has read the whole thing. Doing the sub series in order with each other at least is as far as I would go as far as general advice or sticking strictly to the publication order. If you want to do all the Witches or Death books, then all the Watch, then the Rincewind / UU Wizards books, that’s fine, or jump between them it doesn’t matter. I actually didn’t do any of that myself to be fair. When I started my journey over the Disc myself at 14 I read the first book having picked up a copy at a second hand stall at my first Q-Con. I got the most recent one (Masquerade) due to one of those dodgy book subscription things you used to get in every 2000AD back in the mid 90s. Some of the ones I borrowed from David were the second books in their respective sub-series, so I read Reaper Man and Witches Abroad before Mort or Wyrd Sisters. Until I actually got caught up and was getting them as they were coming out I was all over the place. It didn’t do my appreciation of the books any harm, and that’s why I’d say that fundamentally it’s not that important. Read what you want, in any order you want. Read the blurbs and if something catches your fancy get stuck in.