Everything I read in 2024 - part 2
Normal AI and spooky AI, writing advice, and... exploding cows?
We’re back for part 2 of ‘what I read in 2024’.
Also, my 2023 list is here (part 1), part 2, 3, and 4.
(Note: this post contains Amazon affiliate links. Feel free to use them to support my writing, but by all means find these titles in independent bookstores instead (e.g. PoC and/or queer owned businesses.))
This is a long post, so if you’re reading this as an email, please use the link at the end to check out the full version on the web.
Let’s jump in:
I AM AI
by Ai Jiang
What happens if people living on the edge of poverty can make ends meet by writing at a higher quality than AI chatbots, but also at a competitive rate?
Well… That’s sort of where we are right now…
What then happens if these people can get augmentations to improve their output, but perhaps sacrificing a little humanity with each additional implant?
That’s the core of Ai Jiang’s I AM AI. The play on words between her name and the title waves a little flag that there are many personal layers in this novella. It talks about attachment to community, honouring the self, and creativity-on-demand in late-stage capitalism… Yet it’s also a quite easy-going and light read. It doesn’t spend much time contemplating these issues, and instead tells its brief story then exits.
While I wasn’t strongly moved by it at the time, the concepts in the story have lingered nicely in my memory and I’m happy to have read it. Worth checking out.
Rose/House
by Arkady Martine
In this sci-fi novella with horror undertones. There are houses imbued with super-intelligent AI systems. These houses are inhuman, capable of working for/with humans if they wish, but also able to have some personal rights and authority over themselves. These houses are called ‘haunts’.
The Rose House of the title is one of these houses. Only one person is allowed inside, and only for a few days per year. While she is out of the country, the Rose House sends a report to the local to police to say there is a dead body inside the property. The woman with permission to enter cannot be the killer, and there’s no logical way a person could be dead inside the house. Because Rose House is technically a legal person, the house also isn’t obliged to let a police officer inside to investigate.
Others have compared this story to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, where the house is possessed of its own malevolent and unknowable spirit with its own dark intentions. Personally, I felt it was more akin to Isaac Asimov’s robot stories: there is a puzzle based on AI’s laws, where apparently unbreakable rules have been circumvented, and investigation may even risk triggering the same seemingly-illogical loophole that led to disaster.
The writing was lovely, the ideas were nice, and it was wrapped in a slightly cosmic-horror-esque shell of an AI playing with the rules of its own existence. Intriguing stuff.
The Saddle Club: Horse Crazy
by Bonnie Bryant
Yep. It’s a ‘horse girl’ novel. There are around 100 books in this series, and this was the first. It’s aimed at tweens, and was published in 1988. Did I like it? You know what, it was fun. There’s some clunky writing, absolutely predictable and low-stakes plotting, and a dollop of horse-care tips, but the characters were written in broad strokes and it all trotted* along at a good pace.
*I’m not going to write about this without horse puns. I canter resist them.
Three girls bond over their love of horses: the normal-but-klutzy one, the tomboy-with-ADHD-but-also-very-smart one, and the posh one. They want to go on a horse riding trip together, but they have barriers, like insufficient money or poor grades, and they overcome these together. They also really like horses. It’s all so damn wholesome.
I’m not the target audience at all. I was a bit surprised by how little of the book is actually about horses; it’s much more about friendship and overcoming (minor) challenges.
It’s also unintentionally an incredible time-capsule of tween life in the late 1980s. There’s a scene where one girl has entered a competition in a shop and, unknown to them, won a prize. Their name is in the shop window (no email or text notifications). A second friend sees this and is so excited she must phone the winner immediately, so she leaves the bus stop (no way of knowing when the bus would arrive because there’s no digital readouts) and has to find coins to phone the winner from a phone booth.
The past is a foreign land, and a pre-digital childhood was an isolated, perhaps freer place.
I read this to get a picture of the long-running series, but the snapshot of history was genuinely entertaining. Sweet as sugarlumps.
Uncanny: the origins of fear
by Junji Ito
Ito is author of famously creepy manga stories. There are some brilliant disturbing and unsettling ideas in there. While I’m not much of a manga fan and passed my anime-watching phase about thirty years ago, I’ve huge respect for the concepts he develops, so I was keen to read his thoughts on the uncanny.
Unfortunately, I’m reading on a Kindle. The book is highly visually designed and every page was an image that required zooming to see the text. I gave up.
It’s probably great, but don’t buy this if you’re on an eReader.
Anti-Rule: navigating the lies about fiction writing
by Christian Francis
I’ve read a lot of books about writing. I love Save the Cat Writes A Novel (US, UK), was very inspired by Will Write For Shoes (it might have been the first writing book I read, back in 2006! - US, UK), discovered King’s approach in On Writing (US, UK) absolutely isn’t for me, and many more.
One thing many writing books have in common is their attention to structures. Writing advice columnists (particularly on YouTube and Substack) will also declare pretty strongly there are unbreakable rules: never use adverbs! The inciting incident must happen on page 9 of the film script! … And so on.
This book is against all of that. It’s core message is that we must write what excites and delights us. By following all the rules we end up sounding the same, which is the opposite of finding a strong authorial voice or creative satisfaction.
I’m on the fence about this:
For me, at this point in my career, it was a liberating and useful read. I’ve internalised enough of the writing advice to already know when I want to swerve away from it (like writing in second-person) but it was great to have a whole book about kicking advice to the curb and following instincts.
Nonetheless, I couldn’t recommend this a beginner writer. There are good reasons those structures exist, and learning the craft of making a bowl is important before you make a teapot. I’ve found great value in working with, and against, the established traditions of writing, and they’ve led me to be confident in growing my own tastes and style. I wouldn’t be here without them. If I’d been told ‘screw all the rules, do it however you want’ earlier then I doubt I’d have been as rigorous in my progression, leaving me with weaker foundations as a writer.
If you’re on top of your basics of creative writing but feel hampered in exploring your own style, this is a freeing blast of fresh air, but I’d caution beginners to check out some of the more typical how-to-write classics first.
The Scary Movie Writer’s Guide
by Seth M. Sherwood
This sounded like an interesting read and, based on the pages I’ve zoomed into, it looks like a solid workbook for writing a horror film. The problem? I’m on the Kindle version and every page is an image, again. This means I have to manually pinch-zoom every page and move it left and right to read it, which on an eReader is not a friendly experience.
From the bits I’ve looked at, I think there’s some inspiring stuff in here for horror film writers, but I can only suggest that either the publisher needs to fix the eReader version or you only consider getting a hardcopy.
The Snow Pony
by Alison Lester
(This review mentions topics of deeply serious and personal nature - if that sounds triggering, skip to the next one)
Saddle up, it’s another horse novel!
When I friend heard I was reading ‘Horse Crazy’, she insisted I read The Snow Pony.
Holy shit this book is dark.
This is allegedly a book aimed at tweens and teens, about a girl who loves riding. So far, so safe; however, this is the opposite of Horse Crazy. It’s not just dark, it’s bleak.
Then there’s the alcoholic father.
The abject poverty.
The animals dying from starvation because farmers can’t afford food.
The cows exploding for grazing on the wrong things and getting sick.
The teen girl who is nearly raped and escapes into the snow-covered outback and left to freeze to death.
W T actual living F is this thing I’ve read?
There are probably more terrible things but I’ve blanked them as a coping mechanism.
Yes, it sort of ends happily. There’s a wild horse who will only let one special teen girl ride it. And no-one is raped. No-one actually freezes to death. When those last two are your ‘up’ points, it’s a sign.
This isn’t billed as a horror novel, but it’s one of the darkest, bleakest things I read this year. Perhaps that’s because there’s a distinct sense that this is very heavily inspired by reality, much more so than my typical reads. It feels like a lot of this happened and has been only lightly fictionalised.
So… Yikes.
It’s well written, and not at all my usual fare. If you want something somewhat depressing, this could be the book for you.
Found: an anthology of found footage horror stories
Editors: Andrew Cull and Gabino Iglesias
and…
Found 2: more stories of found footage horror
Editors: Andrew Cull and Gabino Iglesias
As you can tell from the way I read both collections, back-to-back, I love these.
I was a teenager in the 90s, so The Blair Witch Project (US, UK) slammed into cinemas when I was around 20 and its influence has cast a wonderfully dark and long shadow across the horror genre since then. From Paranormal Activity (US, UK) to Host (US, UK), people keep on finding new ways to play with the idea of ‘unintentionally captured spooky stuff’.
Adjacent to found footage, there are ideas like cursed footage (watch it and you’ll die), jinxed filmsets, and suchlike. I love them all. I think it’s because film is such a modern mode of storytelling that it’s fun to see how that modernity clashes with the sense of the uncanny, which thrives on primal, ancient fears.
These books take that idea—found items telling stories—and experiment with that to bang up against the edges of typical writing. We get police reports, letters, descriptions of films, email chains, and text messages.
Some stories are more creative than others. Some use a traditional writing style to tell a story of a person who finds an item of footage, like video tapes, which leads to horror, but many are inspiring and experimental.
I loved the tales that tried to find new ways to convey horror, pushing the many forms of written documentation into the service of storytelling.
Overall, these anthologies were very inspiring reads, and if you’re a horror reader or writer, I recommend you pick them up.
The second edition only came out at the end of 2024, and I’m eagerly awaiting a third!
Next week, I’ll be covering my (mostly horror) audiobook listens from 2024. There are some brilliant stories in there. Subscribe for updates, if you aren’t already.
What were the best things you read in 2024? Anything you’re looking forward to in 2025? Let me know in the comments!
Go be kind and spooky,
Mata
xxx