Novels about juvenile delinquents, short films about consumerism, and a weird classic I got round to far too late are among my cultural highlights from the past year.
I like these little bits of end-of-year housekeeping – looking back, sorting and filing, debating with past Ray the stupid ratings he gave months ago.
I often find that a book or film I wasn’t sure I’d liked has stayed with me and become a reference point, or an inspiration. Liking isn’t everything, it turns out.
Still, those ratings are useful because they help me remember how I felt in the moment, and make it possible to pull out highlights for a post like this.
I’d like to read more. My annual target of 50 books is do-able, just about, but slightly stresses me out. I certainly couldn’t read much more without it turning reading into another task at which I feel I’m failing.
My approach is to write a little capsule review of each book after I’ve finished and mark any book that I had a strong positive feeling about with an asterisk. A ‘strong positive feeling’ might be that it left me feeling cleverer, or moved me, as well as that it was simply enjoyable.
As for films, I don’t have a target, but I do try to watch films rather than TV or (ugh) YouTube. Of course I do watch YouTube, because it’s irresistible, but often feel dirty afterwards. In the hour I spent watching some bloke build a castle out of lolly sticks I could have got through most of a 1940s horror movie.
Films I review and rate on Letterboxd. That gives me quite a granular sense of the real standouts, especially as I’m quite stingy with any rating of four stars or more.
The best new-to-me books of 2025
The Furnished Room by Laura Del-Rivo, published in 1961, is a stone cold classic and anyone who likes both crime fiction and angry young man novels ought to read it. My copy, tatty and yellowing, came from the 50p bin in a charity shop, and its state of near disintegration seemed quite fitting. It’s about a young man who might be a psychopath, who has paedophilic and Nazi fantasies, and who thinks he’s better than everyone else despite being, essentially, a bum. It reminded me of Absolute Beginners (it’s a great West London novel), The Talented Mr Ripley, and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Perhaps there’s even a little of Billy Liar there, if Billy was a killer.
Big Man by Ed McBain (Evan Hunter) from 1959 is in a similar vein, but set in New York City rather than London. I was astonished by its brilliance and vigour and think it might be the best thing McBain wrote in a long, prolific career. The protagonist is a street punk who drifts into a life in organised crime because the mob identify him as someone who can be groomed, and trained to be an emotionless killer. It has several genuinely shocking twists and an utterly bleak ending.
I wrote more about both of the books above in a blog post about juvenile psychopaths earlier in the year, which also includes notes on The Dead Beat by Robert Bloch.
1992’s A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge is a big, high concept sci-fi novel which is bewildering at first but then, when you get used to it, has the pure thrills of a Lucasfilm adventure. My favourite characters were the Skroderiders, sentient plants who have symbiotic relationships with small carts on which they whizz around. There are also packs of intelligent dogs, each of which shares a consciousness and personality, and plenty of big spaceships.
I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai, from 2023, is a murder mystery set in an American private school that plays with, and criticises, the tropes of true crime and podcasting. It’s also about the Me Too movement, male privilege, and institutional wagon circling – conscious or otherwise. I found it both entertaining (“I couldn’t put it down” &c.) and thought provoking, which is always a pleasing combination.
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, 1974, is a rather brilliant study of intergalactic war, spanning centuries, from the point of view of a single soldier. It’s Band of Brothers in space. The constant references to the increasing homosexual population reads as homophobic but I buy the argument that this is supposed to depict the alienation of veterans from the societies for which they fight. (Hey, guess what? It’s about Vietnam.)
Jordan Tannahill’s The Listeners, 2021, is a short, punchy novel that at times reads like weird fiction, and at others like a modern melodrama. A woman hears a mysterious hum. Her family can’t hear it and think she’s losing it. Then she finds that one of her students can hear it, too, and they form a bond that destroys her career and marriage. Slowly, she drifts into what might be a cult, depending on your point of view.
Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson, 1951, is brilliant, compelling, and maddeningly oblique. I think the plot (if plot is the word) is that student Natalie is raped; disassociates; goes through a period of psychedelically intense psychosis; then emerges with new clarity, and new strength. But I spent most of the book feeling anxious and bewildered, in the best possible sense.
Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, 2020, isn’t quite a novel. The plot unravels, the characters are cyphers. Part autobiography, part philosophical ramble, part political tract, it has interesting things to say about Bulgaria, nostalgia, conservatism, and the end of human history. The premise is the hook, though: in a world gone mad, a therapist creates domestic spaces where people can go back in time and ignore the present. But these comforting fantasies prove irresistible and, soon, begin to spread across wider society.
Fleischerei by Saoirse Ní Chiaragáin, 2025, was quite a challenge for me, Britain’s Most Uptight Man™, concerning as it does an intense cannibalistic affair between two outsiders in Berlin. It’s beautifully written, though, and there’s something thrilling about reading what feels like a forbidden text.
Lois the Witch by Elizabeth Gaskell, 1859, was a real highlight of the year, republished as part of the Penguin Archive series as a small, plain paperback. It’s about a young woman in 17th century England who is despatched to America and finds herself a victim of witch madness in Salem. It is tragic and atmospheric, with some brilliant depictions of haunted landscapes:
Sights, inexplicable and mysterious, were dimly seen – Satan, in some shape, seeking whom he might devour. And at the beginning of the long winter season, such whispered tales, such old temptations and hauntings, and devilish terrors, were supposed to be peculiarly rife. Salem was, as it were, snowed up, and left to prey upon itself. The long, dark evenings, the dimly-lighted rooms, the creaking passages, where heterogeneous articles were piled away out of reach of the keen-piercing frost, and where occasionally, in the dead of night, a sound was heard, as of some heavy falling body, when, next morning, everything appeared to be in its right place – so accustomed are we to measure noises by comparison with themselves, and not with the absolute stillness of the night-season – the white mist, coming nearer and nearer to the windows every evening in strange shapes, like phantoms, – all these, and many other circumstances, such as the distant fall of mighty trees in the mysterious forests girdling them round, the faint whoop and cry of some Indian seeking his camp, and unwittingly nearer to the white men’s settlement than either he or they would have liked could they have chosen, the hungry yells of the wild beasts approaching the cattle-pens, – these were the things which made that winter life in Salem, in the memorable time of 1691-2, seem strange, and haunted, and terrific…
I was so impressed by the first two books in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy that I’d been saving Unconditional Surrender, from 1961. It’s incredibly readable and often very funny, almost ‘Bertie Wooster goes to war’. At the same time, it has profound things to say about the coming of the modern world, and the banal inhumanity of modern conflict, which is all paperwork and silent death.
Uncertain Sons by Thomas Ha, 2025, is the book I’ve been naming when asked for recommendations. It’s a collection of thematically linked stories about the apocalypse, mutation, denial, and family relationships. They’re all at very least good, and some are truly great. My favourite story was ‘Where the Old Neighbors Go’ which is about urban gentrification, flavoured with fairy folklore and Ghibliesque talking animals.
1958’s Spotted Hemlock by Gladys Mitchell, my favourite of the golden age mystery writers, was a treat towards the end of the year. A girl goes missing from an agricultural college for women, which is twinned with a similar school for men several miles away across country. The characters, the gothic atmosphere, and the observational humour carry a slightly less than brilliant plot. The sheer raging horniness of the girls in particular is very funny.
I came across The Diving Pool by Yoko Ogawa in the new Vintage Classics ‘Weird Girls’ series. It was originally published in English in 2008 and comprises three long short stories, or short novellas. They’re all rather sick. A girl who tortures a child, while lusting after a fellow inmate at her orphanage. A woman who casually, unconsciously poisons her pregnant sister. And, in the the third and best story, ‘Dormitory’, a sinisterly empty student accommodation block with only one resident and a predatory caretaker.
Finally, BUtterfield 8 by John O’Hara, 1935, is a brilliant evocation of the speakeasy era in New York City. It tells the story of the tragic downfall of glamorous Gloria Wandrous, a wild child with many lovers, who has never not been preyed upon by men.
The best new-to-me films of 2025
I’ve been strict here and limited myself to flagging films that I rated 4.5 stars or higher – plus a couple of entries that, on reflection, I should have rated more highly at the time.
Writer G.F. Newman’s Law & Order, broadcast in four feature-length parts in 1978, is an astonishing achievement. It explains how police corruption works in practice, and why it’s a problem, as we watch the ‘fitting up’ and imprisonment of a low-level criminal from multiple angles. Detective Fred Pyall is the bland, teddy-bearish villain of the piece, abusing his power and knowledge of the system to extract bribes and choose who does and not go to prison. Pyall is played by Derek Martin and his victim is played by Peter Dean, both better known for playing characters in Eastenders. Almost every other face is familiar from British TV soaps or comedies, or British films like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Alan Ford is here, for example, and Ken Campbell gives a surprisingly restrained performance as a corrupt solicitor.
Picnic at Hanging Rock, directed by Peter Weir and released in 1975, took a long time to get to the top of my watchlist. Somewhere along the line, I’d got the idea that it might be an endurance test, perhaps because people keep describing it as ‘dreamlike’ and ‘ambiguous’, which can often mean vague and tedious. But, no, it’s utterly brilliant. From the opening scene, I was mesmerised by the mix of beautiful, hazy visuals and hypnotic, exotic music. Years before The Blair Witch Project or Fargo pulled the same trick, it sells itself as being based on a true story, which is enough to blur the audience’s sense of what is real and what is not. As in reality, as in true stories of crime and disappearance, things don’t make sense in neat and tidy ways. This film is the essence of ‘weird fiction’: ambiguous; unsettling; not only about haunting but actually somehow haunted itself.
The Lonely Shore, Ken Russell, 1962, is an astonishing short film unearthed and shared on the excellent BBC Archive YouTube channel. It feels like one of the apocalyptic short stories written by Michael Moorcock or J.G. Ballard for New Worlds – surreal, weird, disturbing, and deadpan funny. It is packed with breathtaking images conjured up from the contents of a junk shop arranged on a desolate beach. The radiophonic ambient horror score is the icing on the cake.
The Children of Dynmouth, Peter Hammond, 1987, is a TV movie made for the BBC’s Screen One strand. It’s a strange, perverse take on Billy Liar, based on a novel by William Trevor. Timothy Gedge (Simon Fox) is a disturbed teenager with a voyeurism habit. He sticks his nose into the business of the respectable people of Dynmouth and casually blackmails many of them, either to get their help with his talent show act, or just for the sake of entertainment. Sometimes, his accusations are accurate; on other occasions, they’re pure self-dramatising fantasy – but no less dangerous for that. This was Fox’s only acting credit and his drama coach gets a special credit at the end. His non-professional performance only adds to the weirdness, as if an actual oddball has wandered onto the set and is bothering everyone. The character is supposed to have a poor understanding of boundaries, and to be intensely irritating, but I’m not sure the viewer is supposed to find him almost unwatchably annoying, too. I’m glad I persevered, though, because the final act of the film has overtones of Patricia Highsmith, the oblique school of weird fiction, and perhaps even Royston Vasey. This film startled and mesmerised me. It tapped into a bunch of my obsessions – small towns, West Country life, the darkness beneath the surface of suburbia. And, because it’s so obscure, it felt delightfully fresh.
Dinner in America, Adam Rehmeier, 2020, is a delightfully uplifting film from an alien world of Christian family dinners, bullying jocks, and raging punk arsonists. All the performances are excellent but it would be nothing without Emily Skeggs as Patty, a girl who is not secretly a genius, and doesn’t suddenly become a raging beauty when she removes her glasses and shakes out her hair. No, that only happens when a smile or a giggle breaks over her face as she feels real happiness for the first time, and it’s as if a searchlight has been flipped to full beam. The pivotal moment in the film, for me, is when she gets the opportunity to sing a song with Simon (Kyle Gallner), AKA her favourite punk musician John Q. As the intro plays out and she readies herself to sing there’s suspense in the moment. If she can’t sing, and her lyrics are bad, then she’s just the subject of yet another cruel joke. Spoiler: there’s a good reason her song causes a tear to roll down Simon’s bruised cheek.
The Family Way, Roy Boulting, 1966, has a reputation as a bit of a flop. I’m not sure why. For me, it’s the perfect midpoint between the angry young man Northern kitchen sink drama and the swinging sixties sex movie. It’s best known these days as an artefact of Beatles history: the soundtrack is (sort of) by Paul McCartney and hints at the bandstand brass to come on Sgt. Pepper, and some shots of terraced houses and gasworks look like Eleanor Rigby sounds. In itself, however, it’s a sweet little film about a young couple, played by the equally adorable Hayley Mills (Jenny) and Hywel Bennett (Arthur), learning how to be married under the prying noses of family and neighbours. The most surprising theme, however, is queerness. Ezra (John MIlls), Arthur’s gruff working class dad, begins to fear his son is gay. After all, he listens to classical music, reads books and, crucially, hasn’t yet consummated his marriage. When challenged by his wife, however, he becomes gentle: of course he wouldn’t shame his son for it, if it were true; of course he’d be there for him. But there’s more: she points out that Ezra brought his best and closest friend Billy on their honeymoon; that he and Billy were inseparable; that they started each day of the honeymoon with a walk on the beach together, leaving her in the hotel. He becomes dewy eyed when he talks about Billy and misses arm wrestling with him. And Arthur is, it turns out, probably Billy’s son – and reminds Ezra so much of his lost friend that it makes him weep. I mean, blimey.
Strange Days, Kathryn Bigelow, 1995, is a film I could have seen at the cinema when it came out, or on VHS, or on DVD. I finally got round to it 30 years after it came out, and more than a quarter of a century after it is set, on New Year’s Eve 1999. This vision of the then near future is all about organic virtual reality and not, as actually transpired, Netscape Navigator and the Nokia 3210. The details might be wrong but the point holds true: the retreat into nostalgia, the dependence on technology, and the place pornography always has at the cutting edge. It’s beautifully realised with hardly a clunky detail, and shot like a film from ten years later. The lack of obvious CGI must help in this regard. The scenes of violence towards women are hard to stomach, and are supposed to be – here, put this on, don’t look away, you need to watch to understand.
As for new films, I watched and enjoyed both The Brutalist and Nosferatu, but I’m not sure anyone needs more words on either of those right now.
I also want to mention an extremely bad film that is among the maddest things I saw this year. Cipayos, Jorge Coscia, 1989, is a dystopian film from Argentina which has Buenos Aires occupied by British troops – and the tango has been banned! But the underground resistance keeps the dance alive, in back alleys and speakeasies, as they get ready to see off the arrogant invaders once and for all. Key scenes involve British dignitaries at a garden party getting the shits and the Irish soldiers joining in a musical number in which they gaily sing ‘Brits out!’ before switching sides. I want to find more of this kind of thing in 2026.
Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart 