'A Healthy Appetite', a novel (!!!!)
In less vague news...
In the News 📰
The movie and book review that follow in this newsletter were a breeze to write. Low stakes. This, the highlight of the newsletter however, had me lost for words.
I think it might take me a little while longer to find the right ones, but for now, know that this news is the best of my life. A dream that's been an entire being in the making. Every treatment, every pill, every scan, all of them endured with the dogged hope I'll be here to say: I did it.
My novel, A Healthy Appetite, will be published by the coolest and most supportive team at Dead Ink in August 2026. The world is very hard right now, and we must stay conscious and proactive and alive to it. In tandem with this, we must still feel joy.
I hope that you will follow my path to publication and find some. Joy and hope and eventually, when you read my book, see in me, the roots of all of this.
Read the deal announcement on The Bookseller, Bookbrunch and check out Dead Ink’s website.
– K x
Screen Saver 🎬
What I'm Watching
Presence (Dir: Steven Soderbergh, 2024)
Ever wanted to see the world through a ghost's eyes? Well, now you can with Presence, a movie with an especially athletic spectre as your POV. The step count Casper's raking in on his ghostly Apple Watch must be insane.
The movie opens in the pitch black spooky realness of nighttime. The house is empty, unoccupied and one assumes, the ghost is just gagging for someone to fill it: a whole family to scare the shit out of.
In daylight, the house is a subburbian dream house. Marbled kitchen island and swanky light fixtures. The ghost is there in the daylight too, following the family around during their viewing. It stalks the teen girl up the stairs and I think, great, it's going to possess her or fall in love with her. Is this like that one season of American Horror Story where the handsome lad who hangs out in murder house is a ghost and it's pretty mental but sexy, so you know, he gets away with a lot of stuff. But no, the ghost follows all of them. Even the decorators who make the house a different kind of nice. One of them is like clairvoyant or something because they 'won't go in that room', which seems like something worth interrogating but the patriarch looks pissed then shurgs it off.
By this point, I'm ready for the ghost to start doing something other than eaves drop... but then it dawns on me: you the viewer, are the ghost - whoever they are. Trust the process. Strap in, and when I accept this, the books start floating, and that's when I know I've pickled a banger.
The third act really ramps up, so hold on to your hat folks! I'm talking, eyes glued to the screen, mouth in the shape of an 'o' madness and when the revelation comes, my God, does Lucy Liu steal the show.
For fans of Paranormal Activity, Presence is a refreshing take on the haunted house genre. There is more to the narrative than what goes bump in the night (and day). This is a story of a family's unravelling, of grief and fuck ups and the catastrophic reverberations of loss. The central mystery of who the ghost is, of why they're haunting the house kept me gripped all the way until the end.
4 ☆☆☆☆
Poolside Reads 📚
The BEST books to read on holiday from the archive...
The Animals In That Country by Laura Jean McKay (Scribe UK, 2021)
The Animals In That Country is a vivid, razor-sharp exploration of humanity's relationship with animals.
When a viral outbreak means the afflicted start hearing what animals are REALLY saying, the world is tipped outside down.
Jean, our foul-mouthed guide, loves her job playacting what the animals are saying. But when zooflu strikes, and she can ACTUALLY converse with the animals, she's forced to confront the complexities of the animal world and its fixations, tragedies, yearnings and grievances.
The novel is a speculative roller coaster ride. A road trip, to be precise. Jean sets out with her favourite dingo, Sue, who has an unforgettable voice of her own, to recover her granddaughter and son. What she meets along the way is so much of humanity's worst.
The staccato poetry of the animal's voices can be jarring at first, but the sense that infiltrates the jumbled words, when they do land for the reader, are heartbreaking. The scene with the abandoned pigs freed from their slaughter trucks particularly struck me. Their voices a chorus of lamentation that joins the diary cows and their cries for their babies.
If you're after something original, memorable, and as a challenge to how you view the world and our animals, grab this, and you'll never look at animals the same way.
5 ☆☆☆☆☆
As always, my reviews are just that: subjective – none of this is scientific.
"The world is very hard right now, and we must stay conscious and proactive and alive to it. In tandem with this, we must still feel joy."
Truer words were never written. Thank you so much for this. Keep on & godspeed. +1
OMG it's so up your alley!! I can't wait for you to read it xx