This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of rereleased essays. Here I return to part one of a review of The Twittering Machine, first published November 29 2019. We need something to long for, the better to devise grander escapologies. We need the ‘intercalary gush’ of Catholic poet Charles Péguy, a moment of rupture in our daily habits through which to escape not only the Twittering Machine but the unnecessary burden of misery that it successfully monetizes. When I was fir

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of rereleased essays.This one revisits my reviews of two works of contemporary horror, ‘The Unheimlich Manoeuvre’ and ‘Everything That’s Underneath’, first published October 11 2019. As the title suggests, Tracy Fahey’s The Unheimlich Manoeuvre is rooted in the uncanny. As Cate Gardner puts it in her fabulous introduction, the tales occupy ‘a world you and I would recognise. They are stories of folk who take the wrong road, knock on t

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of rereleased essays. A Review of Portals: Gates, Stiles, Windows, Bridges & Other Crossings first published October 4 2020. Since gods of nearly all cultures were believed to inhabit the skies, the route there was usually stepped. It is an acceptable theory that the monumental stone Step Pyramid of Djoser, designed by Imhotep in the 27th century BC, was not only a tomb but intended to facilitate an afterlife in heaven. The high zigg

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of rereleased essays. This is my preface for Born in Blood: Volume II by George Daniel Lea, first released online on April 2020. You can also read my review of volume I here. Love your music, for silence descends. You shouldn’t have seen this, but now that you have, you may as well enjoy the show. Volume Two in the Born in Blood series is a magisterial addition to what is as much a mythos as a frame for diverse fictions. Unique in its

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of rereleased essays.This one revisits my impressions of the stakes after attending an environmental demo, and was published on September 20, 2019.* Nothing much has changed, except for the worse. Today* I joined thousands in London’s centre on a strike against climate change, a protest in solidarity with many more across the world. It was a glorious expression of working class outrage against capitalism’s death cult, a scream of ange

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of rereleased essays. A Review of Born in Blood: Volume One, first published September 13, 2019. They watch, the Flesh-Singers, the Old Fathers; watch and whisper their lullabies into dreaming and fevered minds, inspiration stoked by despair; an escalating need for solutions to apocalyptic ills: drought, rising sea levels, pandemics, economic collapses, mass starvation, over-population, corruption and war and genocide . . . Not their

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of rereleased essays. In reviewing George Daniel Lea's Strange Playgrounds, I explore the possibility that it contains a manifesto for a utopian horror. First Published on Medium, September 6, 2019, and also published on Amazon.uk. Today there was love in the world, and songs echoing through the storm. To go beyond reproduction every author dissects and remakes their genre. For George Daniel Lea’s Strange Playgrounds, horror is oppose

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of rereleased essays. Here I review The Finite and Trying to be So Quiet. First published September 16, 2019. His apathy was still there, a screen between himself and the world. Everything he observed, or did, or said, seemed to happen on the other side of a pane of glass. But the ghost seemed to flit around on his side, a nagging thought he couldn’t rid himself of. The third-person limited voice of James Everington’s Trying To Be So

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of rereleased essays. This one looks at how after the collapse of a political consensus loses its sway, Nowhere looms large. August 30 2019. From 2008 to Brexit, Tina has gone the way of Butskellism While the United Kingdom tumbles into political turmoil like Alice down the rabbit hole, there’s been a not-so recognised casualty of the chaos that’s serially erupted since the crash of 2008 up to (and certainly beyond) our current consti

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of rereleased essays. From Paranoid Fairytales to the Familiar-Strange, here I review two collections of weird horror, ‘Sing Your Sadness Deep’ and ‘Broken on the Inside’. First published on August 9th, 2019. why couldn’t the cure come from within her? From the opening and titular story of Phil Sloman’s Broken on the Inside to its closing piece ‘Virtually Famous’, the play between the internal and the external defines the collection.

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of rereleased essays. This is a more reflective philosophical piece, and one I'm not a hundred percent sure of (not least because I make a point using Friends as an illustration!), but it does express something. First published May 31 2019. While a self-reflective ego might be a necessary point of departure for any human being, it is not a fitting destination for a developed worldview. As a philosophy, egoism is a peculiarly stunted

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of rereleased essays. In this piece, published May 17 2019, I argue that the spoiler is an overrated idea. The following essay also contains spoilers for Million Dollar Baby, Romeo and Juliet, Don Quixote and Death Note. Along time ago, 2005 to be precise, the late, great film critic Roger Ebert published an essay online entitled Critics Have No Right To Play Spoiler. Here, he fairly argued that spoiler warnings are a good idea as a m

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of rereleased essays. This one reviews Becca C. Smith’s The Dream Diaries and it was published Feb 17 2019. Are we morally predetermined? Becca C. Smith’s The Dream Diaries is a magical realist exploration and critique of inherited guilt, the generational repercussions of violence and the nature of human evil. The ambitious story commences with its protagonist, Mara Johnston, as a disconcerting power awakens in her that is enigmatical

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of rereleased essays. Here I review Yukio Mishima's Star to examine his wider political project in all its strangeness, taking a long detour to also discuss his The Sea of Fertility Tetralogy. First published Apr 20 2019. Yukio Mishima is a Japanese author who lived between 1925 and 1970, known—beyond his reputation as a novelist—for his theatrical death: barricading himself inside the Tokyo headquarters of the Eastern Command of the

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of rereleased essays. This piece examines the strange aesthetic mismatch involved in the alt-rights love of the Warhammer 40,000 game. First published Apr 12 2019. It is 1962, Trotskyist theorist Homero Rómulo Cristalli Frasnell, better known as J. Posadas, had just founded the Fourth International Posadist. This new tendency within Trotskyism is an attempt—strange as it might sound—to synthesise Ufology with broader Marxist theory. T

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of rereleased essays. This is a more autobiographical and humorous piece, and marks a break from focussing only on reviews. It was published Feb 9 2019, and recounts the story of an obscure social media website. Thank you to Morgan Hardy Bell, Farnosh Mazandarani, Jordan Hammond, Evan Raitt, Miah Phillips, Carlos-Manuel Costa, Helena Brake and others for being awesome Loowinians and helping me to research this essay. And a special tha

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of rereleased essays. One of the longer of these pieces, this one reviews a work about the life and visions of four nineteenth century utopians; published Dec 21 2018, my review of Michael Robertson’s wonderful The Last Utopians allows me to explore many ideas that are of interest to me. Composing outdoors in the hut he had built himself, using the skills he had developed during a stint in a Brighton’s joiner’s shop; thinning carrots

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of rereleased essays. This piece looks at two, sequential novels by Michelle Angharad Pashley, Black Sheep Cottage and The Remains of the Dead. This was first published Oct 12 2018. Set between 2012 and 2013 in London, Yorkshire and Paris, with events going back to the mid 00s, Michelle Angharad Pashley’s literary thrillerBlack Sheep Cottage gravitates around a crime, circling closer and closer to the the tragic events often through s

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of rereleased essays. This week continues a focus on the work of Chris Bateman, this time reviewing his book The Virtuous Cyborg. It was published July 21 2018. Prior to reading Chris Bateman’s The Virtuous Cyborg, I was becoming infatuated (somewhat late to the fad) with the augmented reality mobile game Pokémon Go, which Bateman uses as a (qualified) example of the good kind of cyborg, making exercise ‘essential to its play (for all

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of rereleased essays. This week's reviews Chris Batman's book Wikipedia Knows Nothing. It was first published Jun 29 2018. The problem with the seduction of facts is that it prevents politics by making experts into ‘superiors’ against whom everyone is ‘inferior’. Even the experts are judged inferior to each other, as anonymous peer review demonstrates. What lies behind this distraction is a faith that expertise can be purged of metaph