Re-view

Two book reviews and some preamble that turned into an accidental essay…

I wrote these reviews last August because I felt compelled to.

My relationship with reviewing has historically been a little fraught. I briefly attended Sheffield University when I was 18. Within a few months, I became the film editor of their pretty decent student newspaper and I also wrote music reviews in exchange for free gig tickets and CDs. Sometimes I’d be so drunk by half-way through a gig, I’d have to get whichever new friend I was with at the time to write the second half.

I transferred to a different university in second year and stopped all that (not the drinking, just the reviewing).

I began again when I moved to London after graduation, as a means of scoring free gig tickets. I enjoyed it, and established a blog where I began offering up my opinion on all sorts of arts and culture events. I didn’t suppose anyone read these reviews, which was an error I learned the hard way after I criticised an art exhibition of a family member I deemed inaccessible. (lol, facepalm emoji etc.)

It hadn’t occurred to me that it would be read by the artist, but it promptly was, and caused a rift. I refused to delete the post at the time but it knocked my confidence and later, I quietly deleted the blog altogether.

In 2018, I established a new, secret blog, compelled once again to write a review in response to an exhibition I’d seen by an artist who had committed suicide. The review was read by someone who had been a friend of the artist. I know this because they emailed the associated account and told me. They were complimentary about the review. Another person got in touch to ask if I knew the artist’s horoscope so I returned to the artist’s friend and discovered the answer. There is no record of this birthday available online.

Since then, I’ve only posted on the blog four times, averaging one review every two years, which feels like a sustainable pace for a sporadic critic. Strangely, and it’s only with hindsight, I notice three out of the four artists I’ve written about committed suicide. For me, i think this has less to do with ‘the dead can’t answer back’ and more to do with having the audacity to opine on the work of a dead person, emboldened by my cloak of anonymity.

A few years ago SPAM Zine invited me to contribute two short reviews to their annual ‘Deep cuts’ feature. It felt like a lovely, non-intimidating opportunity, rendered easier by the celebratory rather than critical emphasis.

That said, I loathe straplines like I-D’s ‘we’re not critics, we’re fans’ (or something like – have they erased that from the search history?). I was appalled to hear that Time Out were phasing out any negative criticism. Nobody or thing ought to be above criticism, and to put forth an opinion first is, in my opinion, brave. Especially since once it’s out there, and people respond, it’s liable to evolve

I enjoy reviewing books on Goodreads occasionally. I am gratified to find I am more compelled to review when I feel positively towards a book than negative, which is interesting given that these days, research indicates people are roughly ten times more likely to leave a review unprompted when they’ve had a negative experience.

People revel in leaving negative reviews online. I was sent into a state of deep hysteria on discovering people had left reviews on Trip Advisor of all the parks and carparks in my local area. One general review of the town was particularly funny to me and I decided to read it out aloud at the event I host. I’ve included it beneath the book reviews.

I was thrilled to have an admittedly pretty basic unpublished poem of mine extensively slated on Reddit this past week; thrilled to read how passionate many people are about what they believe a poem ought to be. I love Reddit as a space where people can express openly. I particularly enjoyed this Reddit dispatch from a Soho Reading Series event.

Returning to Goodreads, I felt a sense of guilt when I left the first review of a novel. It was still a few months out from its publish date but I had an advance copy, thanks to my local booksellers who sometimes save books for me they think I’ll like. I’d enjoyed the author’s previous book so it was a good bet but I honestly thought the book was bewilderingly bad and underwritten. Having, with trepidation, dropped my two cents, I returned to the site several months later and read through the almost unanimously bad reviews, wondering if it was a precedent that I had set.

I wondered if a second site ought to be established called badreads.com

The interesting (to me) thing is that I can read a one-star and five-star rated review of a book and agree with the views of both. It’s a wonderful public display of the spectrum of personal taste.

Last summer, I briefly dated a man whom I noticed had rated a pamphlet by me five stars (yay!), and several months later, when it didn’t work out between us, brought the rating down to two stars (boo). This was staged in a minuscule theatre in my mind, tiny red curtains opening and closing on the different star ratings while all the action took place off stage.

Perhaps an impartial opinion disclaimer button ought to be added?

Neither of the books reviewed below appear when searched in Goodreads, but Nell Osborne’s novel Ghost Driver was just named joint winner of the Queen Mary small press fiction prize, which has prompted me to revisit. I wrote the review before I’d met Nell in person. When she came to Margate to read some of her brilliant poems at the most recent edition of my reading event, I told her I’d written a review. I was almost on the verge of reading it to her when I caught myself and thought I’d better review the review first. It’s different once you’ve met a person. Should it make a difference? As it is, I haven’t changed anything.

I found out ahead of Nell’s visit that one of her publishers at Moist Books (—an excellent press very worth checking out) turned out to be someone I first met in Oxford as a teenager and who I hadn’t seen for many years. We spent a lovely day as a trio hanging out. I like the way things come back around. I like writing my feelings down and returning to them.

Damage by Taos Lopez (The Creative Writing Department, 2025)

No copyright

No ISBN

No Material

is what it says on the interior jacket cover. Flashing my shiny new copy of Damage to a prominent British poet, he comments, ‘That looks like a book that doesn’t want to be read’. I concede it’s an objet d’art, with its wraparound cover image of burning palms in (probably) L.A. and no titles. My interest is piqued by The Creative Writing Department – its somewhat anti-popularity approach to literary publishing.

But Damage does want to be read.

Damage is a noun and a verb. Damage is never one single thing. Damage is beauty and trauma, poetry and / or novel. Damage is cliché, and Damage defies definition. Damage is written in the first person by an unknown narrator and Damage is (superficially) about the object of the narrator’s affections attentions. Damage is a refrain and a mantra, every sentence loaded like a cap gun with a pellet of rapid-fire catharsis. Bang. Bang. Bang. Damage is annoying and damage is addictive. The protagonist is addicted to and dominated by Damage. Sometimes Damage is unnervingly on the nose. Who else here has broken a tooth for love? Damage is on the tooth. Most people know a girl called Damage. Damage is doctrinal and Damage is arrogant. Damage is theatrical, and enjoyable to read aloud down the phone to a brother on the other side of the country at midnight. Damage is a get-out-of-jail-free card. Damage is 214 pages long, and perfect bound. Reading Damage, a question emerges — is Damage a person, or a projection? What’s definite is that Damage is a dangerously indulgent piece of literature. Will Damage cause long-term damage to your psyche, or were you already damaged in the first place, seeking shelter in Damage? Fuck around with Damage and find out.

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Ghost Driver by Nell Osborne (Moist Books, October 2025)

Moist Books has carved out a distinctive niche, publishing writers like Susan Finlay, Nadia de Vries, William Habib Kherbek and Victoria Brooks—authors whose writing exists at the intersection of philosophy, art, queer theory and humour. Into this roster slips Nell Osborne with her debut novel, Ghost Driver.

I enjoyed reading Osborne’s recent slim volume of poetry, Thanks for Everything (Monitor Books), so was curious to see what her prose would be like. I found the writing pleasingly elegant, articulate, with Gwendoline Riley levels of sharp, cool observation and wit.

The novel centres on Malory. While more charismatic than such a name might instinctively evoke, Malory emanates a faded aura, and, as the novel unfolds, there’s a creeping sense of a person allowing themselves to be slowly erased.

One source of this is a lover: non-committal yet brilliant, callous but compelling. The couple’s interactions depict in crystal HD the mechanics of male entitlement and the resulting diminishment. In one scene, when Malory nervously asks him to hold her, Osborne writes:

Her voice came out so politely, as if she were asking a work colleague of Father’s to pass the ketchup at the dinner table of her youth.

Osborne renders this not just as a personal dynamic but as part of a wider Kafkaesque landscape, where patriarchal, institutional and capitalist systems obfuscate any clear path toward success, intimacy, or selfhood. Yet, beyond that, she probes at something deeper, knowing, possibly deliberate. She writes:

Beneath the feeling of needing and losing – of making oneself small and humanitarian to the point of victimhood, so others could be temporarily bigger and implacable to the point of masculinity – there was already such an undercurrent, a heartlessness.

Reading the book, I felt an uncanny shiver of recognition. I became convinced I knew the man who inspired the lover. This thrilled and disturbed me, compromising any possibility of objective distance, transforming the reading experience into an act of active obsession—an insidious achievement, I applaud with disoriented enthusiasm.

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The Tripadvisor review I found when I was trying to see if anyone had listed my event and searched ‘Is it Dirty?’ + ‘Margate’:

Such a shame. It is DREADFUL!
Review of Margate Main Sands
Reviewed 6 August 2024 by 241dellad

What a shock! I went about 30 yrs ago and it was dire then, so I thought it may have improved since then. We were staying near Sandwich to traveled over, to look at Ramsgate and Margate. Ramsgate is a very sad place now, but Margate is diabolical! HOW THE HELL HAS IT BEEN ALLOWED TO GET THAT BAD!!!!!!
We parked [for free on a sunday] in the multi story, and walked through the shops to the beach. The whole place is a dive! We got to the beach, saw what was going on there [on a very hot day] and the amount of rubbish, dog mess etc, turned around, went back to the car and left! 10 minutes in total....and we will NEVER return!
What the hell are people seeing who are writing these great reviews?
This was a beautiful, Victorian seaside town and in the 60’s when I used to go with my mum and dad, it was lovely!
How can you drive a couple of miles up the road and find lovely little sea side towns and villages that are well kept and seem to have people living/visiting who actually care about the places, yet this place seems to be used as the toilet of Kent?
That is what it should be called.....the
Karsi of Kent.
Who ever is responsible for Margate should be thoroughly disgusted with themselves!!!