INTRO

July was a difficult month, full of scrabbling to stay afloat. Trying to reshape my life into something sustainable while also trying to finish a book meant that I was working pretty much all the time, other than the periods in which I was sleeping (which currently seem to be in 3 hour chunks). Not ideal. Oh, also half my city has been on fire. Awful month. Take it away. On to August now, please.

THE NEWS

ICYMI last month:

Scream! Halloween Special 2026 has been announced, and I'm in it, along with several friends!

From the press release:

“October 2026 will see the return of the Eisner-Nominated horror anthology Scream! Featuring a gruesome cadre of twisted storytellers, The Scream! Halloween Special 2026 will show you the true meaning of fear across 48 ghastly and grotesque pages! With comics from a murderously good lineup of top creators including Alex Paknadel, Babs Tarr, Zoe Tunnell, Zac Thompson and Vic Malhotra, Rebellion proudly present five new horror stories to keep you screaming this Halloween!”

My story is in collaboration with the amazing Vic Malhotra, and the art he's doing for this one is a hell of a thing, even at the pencils stage.

The Bog Body is a story about obsession and burnout, as one PhD student's focus on his work becomes all-consuming… a little too literally! I described it in an interview as “damp and unsettling”, and I'm sticking to that.

You can preorder the special HERE.

WHAT AM I WRITING?

In July, I had a very rewarding manuscript swap with friend of the show Sam Fern. We spent two hours talking through each other’s notes; his book is looking very promising indeed, and mine now feels much more on track to become the right shape. Sam’s a very good editor, and if you’re looking to hire someone to gently point out to you where you’ve written your book completely wrong, I can’t recommend him highly enough.

Anyway, the upshot of all of this is that Project V is now 5000 words shorter, several scenes denser, and has one more dead body in it than it did last month, for which I am very sorry. I'm itching to get it in front of my next reader, who I promised it to… a long time ago, but I keep second guessing myself about whether any of it even works any more. But, I suppose, I have to let myself be vulnerable more often.

[Update, soon after I wrote that paragraph: it got longer again. God fucking damn it]

WHAT AM I READING?

July was a month for what I tend to affectionately call “nasty freak books.” I find, in general, that I would always prefer to read a book written for 10 very specific nasty freaks to adore than one written for an audience of millions to quite like.

I read Caro Claire Burke's Yesteryear, a book that was almost interesting but had all its grit sanded down into palatability for a mass audience.

…And then I read CJ Leede's Maeve Fly, a book that revels in perversion and transgression and is almost exclusively joyful, unpalatable grit.

Increasingly, I want personality and specificity and challenging, hostile, spikiness from books. I want books that don't care who likes them because they know that when they find their audience that specific audience will love them. I don't really have a point with this one this month; it's just something I've been thinking about a lot.

What's your favourite book that feels like it's been written to be adored by a tiny, strange audience?

WHAT AM I WATCHING?

Look, my PhD is in Late Antique Greek Epic Poetry. You can’t expect me to have opinions on The Odyssey. It’s not my field.

Yes, I have opinions on The Odyssey. Broadly: I enjoyed it a lot, but it is not as good as The Return.

The striking part of Nolan’s take on The Odyssey, the thing that makes it stand out from every other attempt at putting the mythic past on screen, is the sense of place. Nolan is not aiming for an accurate representation of the ancient Mediterranean, or the sort of generic Greek-ish fantasy of pieces like Clash of the Titans. Large parts of his Mediterranean are shot in Scotland, Iceland, and occupied Western Saharan territories, and look like Scotland, Iceland, and occupied Western Saharan territories far more than they do anywhere in the Greek world.¹ What he captures with this, and with his frequent descents into genuine horror filmmaking, is a powerful sense of the vast unknowable strangeness of the Homeric world. The world of The Odyssey is one where every dark corner hides monsters and every step away from the trade routes plunges you further into monstrosity. It’s a world filled with the danger and near-eldritch fear so familiar from the poems, far removed from the aesthetic comforts we’re used to in presentations of the mythic past.

Pretty much every part of The Odyssey that didn’t land for me is not a failure: it’s a simple case of audience targeting. I, a British Classicist, am not the target audience for this film. It’s made to be as accessible and impactful for a general American audience as possible, and that’s fine. That sounds dismissive, particularly after my comments above about works made for a broad audience to enjoy vs narrow, specific ones, but I don’t mean it that way; this is a 21st century American director interpreting The Odyssey through his specific lens, and aiming at a very specific target audience that just happens to be the one that most big-budget blockbusters treat as a default. There is specificity here, even when it doesn't work, in choosing American accents, in casting recognisable Americans rather than actors of Greek descent, in opening the film on Travis Scott as a rhapsode, in its engagement with monsters but not the divine. Nolan chooses to make The Odyssey a warning about empire and how it devours itself, and the importance of xenia (here translated awkwardly as “Zeus’ Law”).

The film’s glaring weak point is the script, which is, frankly, terrible. I respect its lack of subtlety, and indeed think it probably actively needs to be this blunt about its meaning, but it grinds to a halt every time Odysseus looks into the camera and says “the real Bronze Age Collapse was me all along”. The dialogue really, really stinks. I feel for Emily Wilson, author of the translation Nolan drew on as primary source: the fear that people think she wrote dialogue that bad must be terrible. I can’t emphasise this enough: Nolan's dialogue is really very bad. Wilson's is much, much better.

What Nolan has done here is remarkable. It isn’t perfect, and really, painfully, near-ruinously needed another pass over most of that dialogue, but it is huge and sincere and meaningful and lands far, far more of its ambitions than seems at all reasonable, even if certain aspects fall by the wayside. It’s a very Virgilian take on The Odyssey, and that’s fine: 2026 is far more a moment for Virgils than for Homers. But, perhaps, he could have adapted the Aeneid instead.

I liked most of it a lot. Would I see it again? Yes. But first, I'd go and watch last year's The Return again. That's the better adaptation of The Odyssey, and the more focused and effective one.

¹ _{For more on this particular problem with the film, and Nolan's indefensible choice of shooting location, see here!}

WHAT AM I LISTENING TO?

Now that he’s essentially retired from filmmaking, John Carpenter seems to be spending his time smoking a lot of weed and composing the absolute raddest shit you can possibly imagine, mostly honks and beeps that make up the scores to films that do not exist. This might be the greatest form of retirement anyone has ever attempted, and I have nothing but respect.

Here’s a song from his upcoming album Cathedral, which is the soundtrack to his upcoming comic of the same name, both of which are adapting a dream he had once. It fucks. I cannot wait for the full release this Friday.

MY LINKS

Preorder Scream! Halloween Special 2026

Buy The Restaurant at the Edge of the World (UK)

Buy Off Menu (US)

My bookshop.org reading lists

FRIENDS MAKING THINGS

Friend of the show Alex Plante has a new webcomic! Pip and Gunko is a webcomic about two lovely idiot friends who do not want to admit how much they have in common, all told through tiny little short stories and vignettes. Alex has been drawing this for a while, and I love it very much. You should subscribe to it for updates, because it is very good and I want Alex to get lots of positive feedback and keep on making it so that I, personally, get to read it for ever. Thank you.

Home - Pip and Gunko

OUTRO

August is my birthday month, so legally you have to be nice to me this month. Thank you for your co-operation with this legal mandate.

I leave you with this excellent photo of me receiving some very intense notes from my temporary editor.

• Ollie, Edinburgh, June 2026

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