A couple of years ago, I made a conscious effort to broaden my reading. Until then I had read almost exclusively about zombies, ghosts, and serial killers and it was all getting a bit samey. There are only so many ways you can rip someone’s head off. That said, I loved the Drift by CJ Tudor. Perfect winter reading. And one of the most memorable experiences of the year was hiring a mini-cinema with my book club to watch the movie adaptation of We Need to Talk About Kevin after we’d read the novel. We did a similar thing before with Silence of the Lambs, and it adds a completely new dimension.
The experiment to read more widely is ongoing, and has provided mixed results so far. I still can’t stomach romance or erotica, read into that what you will, but I enjoy books by writers who aren’t from the US or UK. In a lot of cases, it offers an alternative perspective, or at least a slightly skewed one. Life is all about growth. Probably the best book I read in 2025 was the Shadow of the Wind by Spanish writer Carlos Ruis Zafon about a young boy, a hidden library, and the secrets of his favourite writer. A modern classic. As always, my TBR list is growing quicker than my R list, but that’s nothing new.
Anyway, without further a-do, this is a list of every book I read cover-to-cover in 2025. For 2024’s list, go HERE.
The Drift by C.J. Tudor (2023)
Winter Horrorland by Various Authors (2024)
Welsh History: Strange but True by Geoff Brookes (2017)
We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver (2003)
I love horror stories set on boats or in secluded cabins deep in the woods. Or, absolute best case scenario, a cabin on a boat. I don’t know why. Must be the sense of isolation. Here, I got exactly what I wanted, even if the boat in question is moored and now functions as a kind of research facility. In his work for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, Charlie Book has been living aboard and studying the Christabel, a 19th century freighter that lies half-sunken off the coast of Galveston, which now houses a mangrove forest complete with snakes, crabs, and other wildlife. After overcoming tragedy, everything seems to be going well in Book’s life. Right up to the point his ex Ruby shows up with another woman and a baby in tow begging for shelter from an approaching storm, both literal and figurative. Book is naturally wary at first, especially when tall tales of witches, covens, and magic abound. But soon old feelings resurface and he sees an unlikely shot at redemption, if he can only make it through the night alive. But when he realises what he is up against, that might be more difficult than he first imagined.
Apart from the unique setting, I thought one of the strengths of this atmospheric horror thriller is its relentless pace and the revelations (along with the action) come thick and fast. Though the story is certainly fantastical, it somehow manages to retain an element of realism and the characters are fleshed out and relatable, though not to the point that they become overbearing. That said, several of the secondary characters did have very similar traits and it was easy to lose track of them, especially when the story raced toward its climax. My main complaint however, and I realise this might be considered peak pedantry, is the MC’s name. Reading a book about a man called Book just didn’t sit right, especially when he talks about books.
Admittedly, I think this is the first Christopher Golden novel I have read so I am not overly familiar with his style, summarised by one source as being “characterised by a blend of immersive horror, compelling character development, and brisk pacing, often exploring themes of folklore, mythology, and human nature.”
But it probably won’t be the last.
Night Birds is available in paperback and eBook formats on Titan Books from 18 September 2025. You canalso catch Christopher Golden on tour with Tim Lebbon throughout the UK.
Stephen King’s Fairy Tale was sitting on my bedside table for months, mocking me. I began thinking it might be my version of Book of the Dead from the Evil Dead franchise. How the heck was I supposed to sleep next to that? And what was the alternative? Keep ignoring it? Hide it away forever? Then the book wins, man. It wins! Damn you, Sai King. Freaked me out before I even start reading the damn thing. It took me a long time to mentally prepare for Fairy Tale. After a couple of weeks I moved the bookmark past the dedication page. That’s progress, right? It just seemed like a huge challenge to take on. Or a journey to begin. Especially so soon after The Unbearable Lightness of Being almost ruined my soul. Fairy Tale took me four months to finish. My habit of reading more than one book at a time doesn’t help. The reason I am telling you that is because Fairy Tale is probably the best book I read all year. Sometimes taking that leap is worth it. King’s You Like it Darker is a close second.
Elsewhere, I am forever grateful to my book club for broadening my horizons. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro and Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami were both brilliantly written, but way outside the scope of what I would usually read. The Last Passenger by Will Dean also gets credit for a great premise.
I know these days I’m in the minority, but I am absolutely obsessed with magazines. Always have been. Not websites, though I like some of those too, but proper old-school print mags. Back in the day I would spend literally hours looking at the shelves in WH Smith most weeks and bought them by the bag full. That was when there were hundreds to choose from. Now magazines have gone much more niche, and seem to be especially popular with hobbyists. The last time I perused the shelves I noticed a healthy amount of craft titles and more than one magazine about buses. It’s a totally different landscape. I currently subscribe to the print versions of Fortean Times, InPublishing and Classic Rock, and buy GQ or Uncut most months. I’m also partial to the odd travel mag, Wanderlust is a perennial favourite, and Four Four Two is always a good read, especially during the summer when you’re missing football a bit. If anything new comes onto the market, I’ll usually buy an issue or two to check it out, even if I’m not really into the subject matter.
I love everything about mags, but it took me a long time to see beyond the words and pictures and fully appreciate everything else that goes into them – cover lines, layouts, standfirsts, even the fonts they use. Then there’s all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes. The UK magazine industry is (or was) a pretty incestuous state of affairs. The same names crop up all over the place and everyone knows each other. Or at least knows of each other. Pre-internet I used to study panels to see who moved where to do what. Writey McWritey pants used to be an editorial assistant on this title, then he went to be a staff writer on that one, then moved to deputy editor on this other one. It was possible to trace whole career trajectories just from reading magazine panels. Even though at that stage I had very little concept of what the individual roles actually entailed, I found the whole thing fascinating.
I think my love affair with mags started when I was a kid and my parents would buy me copies of Eagle to keep me quiet on long car journeys. I know Eagle was technically a comic, but let’s not split hairs. My favourite bits were always the photo features like Sgt Streetwise, Doomlord and The Collector. Looking back, many of those stories were quite sinister in tone, which probably sowed the seeds for what would come later when I dived head first into horror fiction. When I passed into my teenage years, I discovered the music press. Smash Hits was everything I wanted in a magazine; informative, funny, stylish. Don’t laugh, I’m serious. For a while there back in the mid-eighties, it absolutely bossed the music sector. I branched out sporadically into other titles like Q, Melody Maker, Sounds, Record Collector and NME, before my music tastes changed and I started buying Raw, Metal Hammer, and Kerrang! regularly. Pre-internet, these titles were the only place you could find out about new releases, and usually only a few weeks after they came out. I’m not even joking.
One thing I disliked about the music press, and NME in particular, was the snidey tone it used. It seemed to get a kick from slagging people off, hardworking people who invested everything they had into their art, and its writers did their level best to make you feel stupid for liking anything mainstream while they wanked over obscure Billy Bragg b-sides. It was as if they saw themselves as the cool gang at school, and openly derided anything outside their little poppers-scented bubble. I remember the first issue of Kerrang! I bought, and thinking it was like stumbling across a whole new world. In a way, I had. In the late eighties/early nineties I was heavily into bands like Motley Crue, Guns n’ Roses, Skid Row and Cinderella. You just wouldn’t see them in NME. And if you did, they’d be lambasted. But along with those came all this other stuff like entire genres I’d never heard of. Even the language it used was different. I was sold, and I bought Kerrang! Every week for about a decade. And then came Britpop and that, in particular its Cool Cymru sub-genre, was my new love; Oasis, Manic Street Preachers, Stereophonics, Sleeper, the Verve, Ride, Snow Patrol, Ocean Colour Scene. As much as I was into rock and metal, I always felt as if I was on the outside looking in, even after I started wearing a leather jacket and cowboy boots. But with Britpop/Cool Cymru, I was inside, living it every day. These bands were writing songs about me. Not me personally, obviously, but people just like me with crap jobs, insane girlfriends, bad habits, big dreams and not enough money.
Music magazines on display in a newsagent
It wasn’t all about music. Spurred on by high-profile TV shows like the X Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the nineties spawned a whole raft of paranormal magazines. Fortean Times was (and is) the daddy, having been launched before I was even born, but it was soon joined by the likes of Enigma and Bizarre. FT was one of the first mainstream mags to ever publish any of my stuff, and I’ve been on their subscriber list ever since. One of the best things about coming home after spending another academic year in China was the stack of FTs I knew would be waiting for me. A lot of people I meet are quite dismissive of it and assume it’s a magazine about aliens and conspiracy theories, and it is, to a point. But they don’t understand how cynical and sarcastic it is. That’s probably why my natural writing style is such a good fit.
In the midst of all this, a new magazine launched called Loaded. This was a new concept, a magazine about stuff men wanted to read about; sport, films, music, hot women, gadgets and grooming mixed in with more cerebral features about iconic moments in history, popular culture, and travel. Mostly, it was about having fun. I remember reading one of the first issues in awe and thinking, “These guys are living their best lives. They go everywhere, do everything, and get paid for it?” That was a turning point in my life and, bored of my crap job and insane girlfriend, I decided I wanted to do that. Sign me up. Within a couple of years Loaded had spawned a whole new genre, lad mags, as they were called, and was soon joined on the newsagent racks by Front, Ice, Maxim, Nuts, Zoo, and others, while older mags like FHM, GQ, Esquire and Arena relaunched and tried to reposition themselves to be more in line with this lucrative new market. Competition often brings the best out of people, and consequently this was the golden age of magazines.
Until the Cool Cymru movement put us on the map, Wales didn’t have a lot going for it apart from a huge workforce with nothing to do. One thing you often hear Welsh people talk about is the isolation. We are just so far away from everything, not only geographically but metaphorically (the Springsteen line “There’s something happening somewhere, baby I just know there is” springs to mind) By the turn of the 21st Century I was having stuff published regularly on a freelance basis but I knew that if I was ever going to make it I was going to have to move away from my small village. So I did. To Southampton, where I did a degree in journalism. My dissertation was called ‘The Cultural Impact of Loaded Magazine’ and in my summer holidays I did work experience slots at as many mags as I could (including Front, Ice, and Maxim), which was my initiation to London, the journalism industry, and everything that went with it. It’s not an exaggeration to say I learned more during one of those two-week placements than I did on a three-year degree course. When I graduated I moved to China, only to come back seven years later when I somehow blagged my dream job at Nuts after one of the editors there saw something funny I said on Facebook. I also fulfilled my long held ambition of writing for Loaded, though this happened when the mag was in decline and everyone who had made it what it was had left. Also, they neglected to pay me and I had to start a small claims action to get my money. How Loaded.
Yep, there are far less magazines around now, and as a format print probably won’t be around much longer. It’s just so costly, what with materials, distribution, and all the extra staff you need just to keep things ticking over, not to mention environmental concerns. The lad mags lost the war with feminism and disappeared, and even the music sector has been decimated much like the rest of the music industry. For many, the Internet is both the best and the worst thing to happen. But all this this just makes me appreciate the mags that are left more, and you should too.
I usually start this now annual tradition with a disclaimer that goes something like: “I only managed to read seven books this year, but THIS ONE was really, like, sooooo long!”
It’s taken me aeons to own up to the fact that I’m just a slow reader, but there it is. Shoot me. I read for 30-60 minutes every night, and sometimes that just isn’t reflected in the numbers I put up. Anyway, I made a conscious effort in 2023 to move away from horror fiction and read a more varied selection of books, something I’ve managed largely thanks to the book club at work.
It was a drag at times, but Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 is something I will probably never forget reading. Some of the wordplay, and the conversations that go around in circles, were genius. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera is also worth a mention, even though the plot itself seemed almost secondary to the philosophical ideals the writer was determined to convey. Seeing the stage version of Noviolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names after reading the book was an unforgettable experience, and reading Animal House by James Brown was surreal because I know some of the people he talks about. I owe a lot to Loaded magazine. Without it, I probably wouldn’t even be here writing this.
Stephen King’s Billy Summers was ace. Probably his best in years. I was also pleasantly surprised by Christopher Fowler’s Full Dark House. It’s very English. Very London, to be exact. Only another twenty-odd books in the series to go!
Here are all the books I read cover-to-cover in 2023 (DNFs don’t count)
Final Winter by Iain Rob Wright (2011)
Extreme Survivors: 60 Epic Stories of Human Endurance (2019)
South by Southwest Wales by David Owain Hughes (2018)
The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman (2021)
Tougher then the Rest: The 100 Best Bruce Springsteen Songs by June Skinner Sawyers (2006)
The demands of my day job meant that I read fewer books in 2022 than I have in previous years. I know that’s no real excuse, but it’s the only one I have and I’m sticking to it. That and Barkskins, which crawled by at a snail’s pace and took me about three months to finish. I must admit I was slightly disappointed with Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club, too, given that I’d heard so many good things about it. There were just too many characters who kept popping up willy-nilly and then disappearing just as fast.
Pick of the year is probably Florence De Changy’s The Disappearing Act: The Impossible case of MH370. Things like that just shouldn’t happen in this day and age. Unless they are supposed to happen.
Stranded by Bracken Macleod (2016)
The Legend of the Dogman by David C Posthumus (2022)
Terror Peak by Edward J McFadden III (2022)
HH Holmes: The True History of the White City Devil by Adam Selzer (2019)
Springsteen: The Mojo Collector’s Series by Various Authors (2021)
The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman (2021)
The Purisima Hauntings by Hazel Holmes (2022)
The Disappearing Act: The Impossible case of MH370 by Florence De Changy (2021)
The Very Best of Classic Rock by Various Authors (2022)
Mothman: Return to Point Pleasant by Scott Donnelly (2022)
My Life in Dire Straits by John Illsey (2021)
The Ghosts of Hexley Airport by Amy Cross (2022 version)
It’s that time of year again, when I humbly present to you a complete list of the books I read this year. Or last year, by the time you read this. I’m sure there’s a few missing. This list seems pretty short! In my defence, there are a few 600-page beasts. The pick of the long-form fiction was Stephen King’s Later. I read most of his books, and it can be hard to tell when his form dips because the overall quality is so high. It’s only when you read something as good as Later and then compare it to his existing arsenal that you realize he isn’t called The Master for nothing
I deliberately read some books last year by writers I’d never read before, the pick of which was The Book Club by C.J. Cooper, a thriller my mother urged me to read. I also read a Richard Laymon book for the first time in 20-years, that brought back some memories and reaquainted me with the word ‘rump’ (if you know, you know) and and A LOT of anthologies.
By the way, that isn’t my bookshelf in the photo. It’s just a photo of a massive set of bookshelves I stole from Google. Sorry to disappoint.
The Greatest Survival Stories of All Time by Cara Tabachnick (2019)
As is customary, below is a complete list of all the books I read, from cover to cover (or from 0 to 100%, as is increasingly the case) in 2020. This list is a bit longer than other recent reading lists, we can blame being in self-isolation half the year for that. I won’t bother counting the books I gave up on. There’s been a few. I’m disappointed with myself for not finishing Infinite Jest, though proud of the fact that I made it to about 30%. From what I gather, it’s one of those books you either love or hate. I fell into the latter camp. Too wordy, dense, and pretentious. I deserve some credit for persevering as long as I did with it.
To compensate, this list also a couple of shorter books. The Craft Beer Textbook is only 38 pages long. But it’s still a book, and I still read it so it counts. I finally got around to reading the second Secret Footballer book, which I remember buying at Heathrow airport a few years ago. It was great until he started talking about literature and quantum mechanics in an obvious attempt to show us he’s more than just a footballer. I made a conscious effort to branch out a bit and sample some work by authors I haven’t read before, and generally speaking I made some good choices. Pick of the bunch was probably Nick Cutter’s The Troop which, fittingly, is about a rogue virus. Kind of. I don’t know why it took me so long to read it, but it’s epic. Stephen King, Amy Cross and Jason Arnopp were as reliable as ever, and Adam Nevill’s mini-anthology Before You Wake is well worth a look.
The Horror Collection: White Edition by Various Authors (2019)
Resurrection: A Zombie Novel (Book One) by Michael J. Totten (2014)
Ghoster by Jason Arnopp (2019)
Can I Say: Living Large, Cheating death, and Drums, Drums, Drums, by Travis Barker (2015)
Bloody London: A Shocking Guide to London’s Gruesome Past and Present by Declan McHugh (2012)
After: Undead Wars by Various Authors (2018)
The Institute by Stephen King (2019)
I Was Jack the Ripper by Michael Bray (2017)
Wales of the Unexpected by Richard Holland (2005)
Sex, Marry, Kill by Todd Travis (2014)
Mountain of the Dead: The Dyatlov Pass incident by Keith McCloskey (2013)
Test Patterns: Creature Features by Various Authors (2018)
Billy Joel: The Definitive Biography by Fred Schruers (2014 ed)
Logging off by Nick Spalding (2020)
The Craft Beer Textbook by Jonny Garrett (2020)
Sunbather by Frank Floyd (2020)
The Lighthouse by Keith McCloskey (2014)
If It Bleeds by Stephen King (2020)
Ten Chimes to Midnight: A Collection of Ghost stories by Amy Cross (2019)
As is now customary, below is a complete list of all the books I read, from cover to cover (or from 0 to 100%, as is increasingly the case) last year. I gave up on more than a few, which I won’t bother to name. Life’s too short to read a shitty book.
I didn’t read as much as I would have liked in the first half of the year, but in my defence a couple of entries in this list are absolute monsters. I actually started the longest, Sleeping Beauties, weighing in at 702 pages, about eighteen months ago. I kept drifting in and out of it. All things considered, let’s just say that it was far too long and meandering. A good editor could cut at least 30% off the word count and not lose anything from the plot. I had high hopes for the Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware, but I rolled my eyes so much reading it that by the end it was like a physical affliction. Amy Cross hit another couple of home runs, but probably the best book I read last year was Lost at Sea by British journalist Jon Ronson. A selection of essays and investigative reports, it’s not my usual thing but I found it both insightful and refreshing.
I’ve been making a conscious effort to read more widely, which is why I gave some new writers a shot. At least, writers new to me. And I fell back in love with the short story and read a bunch of anthologies, the pick of which being Body Horror: Trigger Warning. And I’m not just saying that because one of my stories is in it. Ultimately, however, I returned to Dean Koontz after a long break. I actually forgot how good the guy is. At first, anyway. But then a dog and a demented serial killer turned up like they do in all his books and I had to suffer yet more preachy, religious overtones. Sigh.
Signal Failure by David Wailing (2016)
Private Number/claws by Derek Muk (2018)
Stranded by Renee Miller (2018)
The Lighthouse by Amy Cross (2015)
The Last Days of by Jack Sparks Jason Arnopp (2017)
The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware (2017)
Filthy Beast: Diary of an English Teacher in China by White Buffalo (2018)
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