I have a guest post over at the Barnes and Noble Reads blog on the subject of monsters.
“I love monsters.
But what makes a good one? For me the definition is it’s a category error. Something that, no matter how hard you try, won’t conform to the boxes that make up your mind (well, my mind anyway). The creature in Frankenstein is a classic example. It lives but is stitched together from bits of dead things.”
My debut “The Lighthouse at the End of the World” has been selected as their speculative fiction pick for April 2026 and is currently in their list of paperback bestsellers.
About fifteen years ago, I was in mid-town Manhattan standing in the monolithic Barnes and Noble on Fifth Avenue. I’d not long had my first short story published. I’d just bought a copy of Michael Chabon’s wonderful Kavalier and Clay and I remember, idly daydreaming that my own book might be in that book store one day (although at this point, I hadn’t written anything much longer than a shopping list.)
If you haven’t read this … then you probably should.
Weeeell. I’m as statistically sure as I can be (without getting actual documentary evidence) that that has now happened.
Achievement unlocked.
So, The Lighthouse at the End of the World, has been out in the world for about three weeks at this point. As you might expect, this is a strange and (mostly) wonderful thing. I think, I’m just about beginning to get my head around it.
At the very least, the next time I’m at a literary cocktail party (of which I attend oh-so-very-many) and someone asks, “have I read anything of yours?” I can just point them at Barnes & Noble or Waterstones.
When the book came out in the US at the end of March, initially, it felt a little abstract. I knew this thing was out there, a stack of papery objects with my name on, about three-thousand miles away on the other side of an ocean. It was a slightly unreal, almost uneasy, feeling.
Publishers are at pains to keep this sort of information completely under wraps, so the cheeky sods at Titan had kept this secret until the day after the US release. To say I nearly fell off my chair is an understatement.
Even so, it did still feel oddly academic until a day later, when I was queuing in the local Londis to buy a pint of milk. A friend of mine based in LA sent me a photo of my weird little tome sitting in the front window in one of Barnes and Noble’s Hollywood bookstores. There it is in the picture below, third row down.
If you’re a mouthy kid from Tooting (and I am), that is a pretty surreal moment.
Window display at the B&N in The Plaza, LA
So, the last three weeks have seen me trying to keep up with publication day without totally losing my shit:
An interview with Jim Mcleod at Ginger Nuts of Horror. Despite its brilliantly facetious name, this is a really cool site that takes its genre fiction (not too) seriously.
A guest post on the subject of Monsters at the Barnes and Noble reads blog.
Appearing at Super Relaxed Fantasy Club in London on 14th April. This is a very friendly meet-up for London-based fantasy fans and happens on the second Tuesday of each month at the Star of Kings pub near Kings Cross. Events are advertised on this Facebook group and consist of a couple of authors doing readings and interviews. The vibe is very low-key and friendly, I really can’t recommend it enough, if you happen to be in the area.
A conversation with Derek Tyler Attico for the Soul of the Story podcast on the SyFy Sistas YouTube Channel. Derek is a lovely person who I met at Worldcon a couple of years ago. He’s a consummate podcast host, brilliant writer in his own right and a pretty passionate Star Trek fan to boot. (He wrote The Autobiography of Benjamin Sisko for Titan).
Generally, I’ve been steering well clear of reviews. Not because I’m an ego-crazed narcissist tyrant who doesn’t want feedback, (does two out of three count?) Rather, I really don’t need any extra brain-weevils in addition to the ones I’ve been blessed with kicking around in my head while I’m writing.
That said, here are a couple that my agent has cast in my direction.
Generally, I’ve been delighted with the book’s reception and Mcleod’s conclusion that “this is British speculative fiction doing something different” is the sort of capsule review that I want tattooed on my forehead.
It’s odd now to think back to all that time ago when I was in Manhattan. I hung around Brooklyn hoping to bump into Paul Auster doing a cigar run. Alas, that will never happen now, but at least I might be in the same bookshop as him. And that feels like something to celebrate.
My debut fantasy novel, The Lighthouse at the End of the World, the first in the Cities of the Drift series is published by Titan Books. You can purchase it here.
I think my fascination with weird spaces began as an introverted, book-licking kid, reading about the Bermuda Triangle in the pages of Unexplained magazine. Today, the Triangle might be more famous for the cheese deluxe of the Barry Manilow song, but back then it was a terrifying region where the certainties of Cartesian space and time seemed to falter, with planes, boats, and people entering it only to vanish mysteriously. (Most notably, Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind even hinted cheekily at their fate.)
Francois Truffaut shuts his eyes and thinks of the cheque in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind
As I grew older, I discovered these haunted landscapes in the pages of the “old weird” e.g. Machen’s The White People, Blackwood’s The Willows, and later, the deeply ambiguous Québécois outback of Atwood’s Surfacing. These uncertain, liminal spaces got under my skin, needling away, stinging like a hangnail.
This obsession only intensified when I came across Vandermeer’s Annihilation and the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic. In both of these novels, the weird landscape is the driver of the narrative. Roadside Picnic, set in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, explores the aftermath of an alien visit that has left behind mysterious “Zones” filled with gravitational anomalies, toxic hazards, and sinister locales where the shadows “look wrong”.
In the face of the economic exigencies of the late-period Soviet Union, human “Stalkers” sneak into these zones to make off with little-understood, abandoned technology to sell for mis-use on the black market. Red Schuhart, the novel’s hard-bitten protagonist, likens their actions to “children playing with matches in a house on fire. The Zone is the fire, and we’re too blind to see the danger.”
The Strugatskys’ Zone is an eruption into human reality, of what Lovecraft (everybody’s favourite tomb-faced, racist bell-end) would have called “the outside”. Consequently, the novel is much less about aliens than it is about the limits of human knowledge and subsequently the human condition.
Similarly, in Vandermeer’s Annihilation, Area X is a weird space that infiltrates human power structures, replacing them with a mycological plane reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari’s “body without organs”. As its protagonist (known only as the Biologist) discovers, Area X is a place where the human experience is interrogated, undermined, and ultimately transformed.
What keeps me coming back to these books is their conjuring of non-human presence as absence, evoking Mark Fisher’s definition of the eerie as, “the sensation of … something present where there should be nothing.” In Roadside Picnic, this absence is the unresolved mystery of the aliens’ purpose. Some believe that Earth was just a stopover, humanity unnoticed, while others think the aliens never left, still lurking invisibly in the Zone: the mutations in Stalkers’ children hinting at, perhaps, a slow-motion genetic invasion.
Similarly, Vandermeer’s Area X is a metaphor for the climate crisis, a rebellion against humanity and capitalism by a Gaian hyper-entity. The Biologist’s journey through Area X, where the landscape observes her as much as she observes it, suggesting a move beyond the human towards a type of becoming-animal futurity.
These books resonate now more than ever, I think, because the early 21st century is a profoundly weird and eerie space. The climate crisis, flame-throwing cyber-dogs and generative AI have woven a sense of the uncanny, of presence-where-we-know-there-is-only-absence, into the texture of everyday life. The Bermuda Triangle, the Zone, and Area X have swallowed the world, making our sense of the human feel contingent and in urgent need of reinvention.
The Maz-master is a man at ease with his uncanny carpet choices
