Bat Eater, by Kylie Lee Baker

“Something grabs the back of her shirt and Cora can’t scream, all her words extinguished in her chest. This is when she dies. The weak link, the boring character in a horror movie who nobody liked anyway, the one with no defining traits, a name no one can remember.” (p. 160)

This deliciously horrible thriller won the Shirley Jackson Award over the weekend. It was first published last year as Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng, but the Hodder & Stoughton paperback I read is just Bat Eater — on the cover, on the title page and in the indicia, but not in the closing Author’s Note. How ironic to erase the main character’s name from the title of her own story, given what it’s about.

Cora Zeng is an anxious young Chinese American woman living in New York in 2020, during the Covid pandemic. She works as a cleaner of crime scenes with two other Chinese American misfits, Yifei and Harvey, and she’s grieving the death of her half-sister Delilah, who Cora witnessed being pushed in front of a train by a white man who used the term “bat eater”.

That murder is described in shocking, gory detail and the novel doesn’t hold back on what Cora’s job involves. It is a literally visceral novel, all wet and tender. Cora is haunted by the death of her half-sister, and then haunted by a hungry ghost. She and her co-workers then realise there’s a pattern to the crime scenes they’re cleaning, which seems to be linked to the ghost. To make sense of this, Cora must explore aspects of her own identity and cultural history. There is more than one way to deal with jiāngshī, not all of them successful.

This is a brilliant, compelling novel, especially good on character so that — despite the quote above — we really feel the loss of people. It was interesting to read this so soon after The Lost Voices of Pompeii by Jess Venner, which attempts to return voices to the voiceless victims of a tragedy. There’s something similar going on here, too.

At one point, Bat Eater also reminded me of the most haunting bit in the film Halloween (1978), when Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) runs to a neighbour’s house for help, and though we can see the neighbour through the window, he doesn’t answer the door. For all the film is about a violent serial killer, it’s that small moment of ordinary indifference that has always stayed with me. It’s the same here: for all the supernatural stuff going on, what makes this so powerful, so disturbing, is the horror or ordinary people.

Mr Benn in the Telegraph

I've written a piece on Mr Benn and the work of my hero David McKee (1935-2022) for the Telegraph: "Where the strange, secret world of Mr Benn came from". For this, I spoke to McKee's son Brett, film editor Clive Juster, and am also grateful to the team at Andersen Press.

ETA: It's also in the print edition under the title "Remembering the man who gave us Elmer and Mr Benn", pp. 14-15, Sunday supplement to Sunday Telegraph 12 July 2026. 

The piece ties in to the new exhibition, "Elmer and Mr Benn: the magic of David McKee", running at St Barbe Museum + Art Gallery in Lymington until 6 September. I helped write the panels for the exhibition, and this Friday will be giving a talk at Lymington Baptist Church about McKee and his work:

The David McKee Sketchbook: The Origins of Mr Benn and Elmer

7.30 pm, Friday 17 July 2026

Lymington Baptist Church, New Street SO41 9BH

Tickets £5, or free to friends of St Barbe Museum + Art Gallery

Arturo’s Island, by Elsa Morante

Having whizzed through The Lost Voices of Pompeii while on holiday in Naples, I found — horror of horrors — that I had nothing to read, so nosed through the Feltrinelli bookshop in Stazione Centrale looking for something in English. This classic novel, set on an island in the Bay of Naples, seemed the right sort of thing…

Arturo Gerace is 14, and has lived his whole life in a ramshackle old house — a castle — on a little island, where the only other distinguishing feature is a prison. The previous owners of the house banned women from it, and Arturo has grown up with little female contact beyond a dog who died giving birth to a litter that didn’t survive either.

So when Arturo’s wandering father returns home with a new wife, Nunziatella, who is only two years older than Arturo, she makes quite an impression. Arturo is variously angry, jealous, contemptuous and lusty. Meanwhile, his father disappears for months on end — and turns out to have some kind of relationship with one of the inmates of the prison. Arturo’s mother also died in childbirth, and his feelings for this perfect woman he never knew informs a lot of his outlook and unconscious desires.

First published as L’isola di Arturo in 1957 and translated for this edition by Ann Goldstein in 2019, there’s a lot going on here that isn’t quite spelled out — because Arturo, narrating, hasn’t quite figured it all out for himself. At first it seems quite simple but there are depths and undercurrents: Arturo misreads people’s words and actions, assuming for example that Nunziatella does not reciprocate his feelings because she tells him “no”.

In some ways, Arturo and Nunziatella are just as much inmates as the men in the prison, and then there’s wandering Wilhelm, the paterfamilias, who escapes whenever he can. The Freudian psychology running through a lot of the novel is very of its time (see, for example, my piece for the Lancet Psychiatry on the Freudian influence on Frank Herbert, author of Dune.)

It feels relatively timeless until the last part of the novel when Arturo, turning 16, learns there is going to be a world war. When the prisoner is released, turns up at the house and helps himself to food left our for Arturo, there’s an uncomfortable confrontation — when Wilhelm gives his verdict of his son, and Arturo storms out, meaning to sign up to the army. The book ends with him leaving the island for the first time without looking back, off to an uncertain fate.

As I read the novel, I wasn’t sure there was much to it — it seemed to keep promising something about to happen, and then never quite deliver. But in retrospect I’ve been picking over what characters said and did and must have been thinking, making sense of the real story going on under the surface. Then haunting thought is that Arturo, going to war, did not live to do the same.

I would like to read more of and about Elsa Morante; Penguin Classics published a new edition of her debut novel Lies and Sorcery in April and is reissuing History in November.

The Lost Voices of Pompeii, by Jess Venner

For my recent 50th birthday, the Dr and the children took me to Pompeii — a trip I’ve wanted to make since studying the subject at school. They also bought me this new novel, which is an exercise in what the author calls “critical fabulation”, a,

“refusal to treat gaps in the evidence as dead ends,”, 

while seeing,

“absence as production space” (p.18).

This is very much my wheel-house — I’ve written books about absences in the historical record relating to old Doctor Who serials: The Evil of the Daleks (1967), where just one of the seven episodes survives; and The Edge of Destruction (1964), where no production file and very little paperwork survives.

After a scene-setting introduction, each chapter of The Lost Voices of Pompeii follows one of seven people in the 24 hours before the eruption of Vesuvius. There’s some overlap between the lives of Petrinus the slave, Julius Felix the businesswoman, Aulus Umbricius Scaurus the everyman, Umbricia Forunata the matriarch of a working poor family, Euxinus the innkeeper, Amisusius the priest of Isis, and Gaius Cuspius Panda the politician. The structure reminded me a little of 253 by Geoff Ryman, with the same sense of these individual lives connecting into something bigger and more profound.

We see some of the same events from their different perspectives, so understand what a business deal or prayer or shopping trip mean depending on class and status. It’s a good way to explore the intricacies of Roman society. The book is peppered with photographs and footnotes, underlining the fact that this is based on the real, and I found it a bit strange to visit the real-life house of Julia Felix having just read about her.

There’s then a chapter on what happens to these people in the hours after the eruption, and a chapter on the longer-term aftermath. It’s a moving story, but then I also found Pompeii by Robert Harris (2003) and the TV mini-series The Last Days of Pompeii (1984), bits of which we watched at school. 

What’s different is how much more firmly Dr Venner bases her story in fact. That includes some relatively recent new assessments — that the eruption did not take place on 24 August 79, but was later in the year (she suggests 24 October), and that fewer people died than once thought. She gives a figure of between 1,600 and 1,700, or between 9% and 11% of the population (p. 19). (That will be of some solace to Donna Noble, I thought, as we watched The Fires of Pompeii after our trek around the town.)

Dr Venner argues that her “critical fabulation” gives a voice back to the voiceless. I really like the way she explains, in the footnotes, where she’s based things on evidence and where she has embellished things. I can see she’s also tried to make this relevant to now, so there are referencing to upselling, personal brands and so on. I wonder how much those and this fictionalising approach will date over time.

We were in Naples for three nights. On our first evening, we went to the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, where I was stunned by the frescoes. They’re were once displayed like works of art in a gallery, but now they’re vivid evidence of people’s ordinary / extraordinary lives.

That was a good grounding before a long, hot day at Pompeii itself. I’d seen photos and footage of the site but being there I was knocked out by the scale — a whole town, with main thoroughfares and back streets, whole chunks of it still buried. Waiting in a shady spot at one end of the forum for the Dr to catch us up, it struck me that it was of a similar scale to the Winchester, where I grew up, once a Roman city.

The following day, we explored Herculaneum, which I think the children preferred because there were fewer herds of tourists and more cats. 

The Dr has written her own blog post about the trip, “What remains of humans: Casts in Pompeii.”

A British Childhood, by Frank Cottrell-Boyce

I've written a review for Social Care Today of the new book A British Childhood - How Our Children Live Now by the children's laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce.

Slow Gods, by Claire North

Mawukana na-Vdnaze, the narrator of this novel, has been dead a few times. But being remembered or even thought of brings him back from the dead, or brings back something very like him - he refers to himself as a copy.

The reason he's become immortal, or whatever it is he's become, is that Maw is a pressganged pilot through arcspace, which normally drives people insane or makes them and their ships disappear. For some reason, it has made him something unsettlingly other. He calls himself a monster.

At the same time, Maw's people have been visited by god-like beings who warn of the death of a star in 200 hundred years time which will wipe out a sizeable chunk of the galaxy, including populated worlds. The oppresive regime has time to prepare, but instead decides to suppress news of this announcement. The undying Maw carries out assignments, falls tragically in love, and all the while the clock is ticking to the inevitable foom...

This is space opera on mind-bending scale, and yet it's about something we have seen and continue to see in our own lives here on mundane Earth - the ways people deal with, or refuse to even recognise, crisis. There's loads of strange and haunting stuff going on: the exact nature of what has happened to Maw, and what he now is and can do; the efforts of communities to preserve something of themselves before it is all lost; the way we live with impending and actual loss. 

The result is something big on ideas but also very emotional. It is thrillingly exciting on an epic scale and yet also very personal, which is a natty trick to pull off so well. One key element is an unrequited love story where completely understanding the perspectives of both parties doesn't make it any less heartbreaking.

The stuff about the weird effects on pilots in arcspace reminded me of the classic "Scanners Live in Vain" by Cordwainer Smith (1950). In the deaths and resurrections, there are echoes of North's brilliant The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. But, brilliantly, it remained surprising right up to the last page.

Justin Richards, 1961-2026

My former editor Justin died last weekend. His great friend Peter Anghelides has written movingly about him. 

I knew Justin, first, for his brilliant, brilliant debut novel Theatre of War (1994), which is so smart, funny and surprising. He found clever things to do with companion Bernice Summerfield being an archaeologist, and it’s really good on what history actually is. But for all it’s keenly intelligent, it’s also great fun.

By mid 1999, I was in correspondence with Justin as he patiently read and gently rejected my pitches for Doctor Who novels. He was always encouraging, on one occasion recommending that I read Story by David McKee before trying again, on another telling me that a thriller plot like I had in mind needed to feel— as the reader read the book — like a zigzagging path, lurching in different, surprising directions. But at the end, when the reader looked back the way we’d come together, they should see it had really been one long, straight avenue, the ending inevitable.

He bent the rules to commission my first book before the particular range was brought to an end. There would always be “just a few notes”, often saying what he liked as much as what he wanted changed. 

When I had a bit of a bruising, unhappy experience on a writing project nothing to do with Justin, he insisted on buying me lunch so that he could share — off the record — his own similar, bruising experience of some years before. He was so funny about it, so at ease, and lifted off all the weight I’d not even been conscious of carrying.

I saw his patience, his generosity, his intelligence and mischievous sense of fun on numerous occasions. It’s why he is such a keenly felt loss.