Review - Itch by Gemma Amor

Itch
Gemma Amor

Hodder & Stoughton, 9 October 2025
Available as: HB, 352pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781399745369

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of Itch to consider for review.

"It looked like something from a fairytale about lost children following trails of breadcrumbs..."

Itch is Josie's story. Brought up, after the death of her mother ("She still found that absence difficult to cope with. It was like leaving a conversation partway through") by a slovenly father, Josie watches her mother's neat, tidy home being degraded and soiled. Her dad, alternately bullying and wheedling, can perhaps be excused a lot, but Josie grows up nervous and neglected, full of tics and avoidance.

She doesn't remember her childhood. It's blotted out. By her.

Small wonder, perhaps, that she falls in with an abusive partner whose chief joy seems to be in controlling her and who eventually lands Josie in hospital.

And so Josie ends up back in the Forest of Dean, living in her dad's holiday let - which he makes clear is on sufferance. 

It feels to me almost like a release when Josie stumbles on a decaying corpse in the woods. (Do be aware that this scene is authentically revolting - not one to tackle when eating your lunch, as I stupidly did!) While the discovery is traumatising, and the effect on Josie is profound, the body, and the subsequent murder investigation, provide a focus for her life. 

I say the effect is profound. That's perhaps putting it mildly, without giving too much away, there is a sense in which I think Josie takes the violence of the killing into herself, imagining - or does she? - that the crawling ants she discovered around the dead body have somehow infested her. Crossing the line from hallucination to real, physical presence, Josie views the colony now infesting her as an actual, almost sentient thing. Her attempts to rid herself of it are vivid and concrete - washing, scratching herself till she bleeds, even scraping her eyeballs - and distressing to read. But her growing acceptance of it as an entity, almost an actor in the events that unfold, is if anything even more so.

As the police investigation into the dead girl focusses more and more on Josie, her father's behaviour grows more menacing, and dark secrets emerge from the woods, Josie endures a punishing winter of malice and loneliness.

Itch really is a dark story. Josie's relationships are in a bad place. Her mental health is suffering (Josie's mood, her internal monologue with its undermining narrative, and her frenzied attempts to regain control, are touchstones of this story). The murder casts a shadow over her life. And her hometown, isolated in the woods of the Forest of Dean, indulges in a yearly "Devil's March" that is either a commemoration of said Devil, an attempt to exorcise him - or, as one local folklorist believes, a ritualised attempt at scapegoating difficult women.

I really enjoyed the folk-horror vibes that the March, and its mythology, evoked. Despite Jacob's (that folklorist) urgings to follow the Old Ways, Josie is sceptical of the meaning of the March and as it becomes increasing clear that there are powers abroad in the Forest, she's sceptical of them, too. They might be invoked, but if you bargain with the Devil, you'd better get the terms right? The ethical landscape here is much, more complex than "appeal to the Old Ways and they'll fix things". The infestation Josie suffers is similarly ambiguous. It, and the murders, and her tangled relationships, seem to be related, part of a pattern that's ensnared her her all her life, but it's unclear how - even if Josie can work out what happened - she can get herself clear of it.

A vivid, enthralling story, one ideal for dark winter nights.

For more information about Itch, see the publisher's website here.

Review - Why Q Needs U by Danny Bate

Why Q Needs U

Danny Bate
Bl!nk (Bonnier Publishing), 2 October 2025
Available as: HB, 376pp, audio, e
Source: Bought
ISBN(HB): 9781785307430

I enjoy listening to Dr Danny Bate's podcast, A Language I Love Is, so  was excited to hear that he had a book appearing, especially as it takes on a subject that sticks out as a problem with English - the spelling.

Compared with other languages, one can make a case that English spelling is irregular, confusing, and hard to learn. Indeed, there's an old joke that English spelling is so weird that you could spell there word "fish" as "ghoti".  This has always annoyed me. Yes, those letters are used in various places for sounds that could make "enough". But nobody who can read English would see them and hear that. You would pronounce those letters as something like "goatee". 

But that leaves the question, why? Danny Bate sets out to explain the facts. As part of that, he works his way through the modern English alphabet, explaining where the letters came from - tracing the story back into Latin, Greek and Phoenician, and ending up with the early Semitic language speakers who adapted many of the symbols from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.  (So the story goes back 3000+ years!)

As a non-linguist, it was a revelation to me just how much of what now seems to be so fixed - what could be more solid than the alphabet? - was in flux for centuries, in fact till very recently, with letters being repurposed for new sounds, dropped, reinstated, reused and spun off from one another (so, G started as C, with the little crosspiece added to form a new letter). Along the way a few were lost completely (please hold poor ð and þ in your thoughts). 

The history of the letters - one per chapter - naturally draws us into an explanation of what sounds they were used for, in Greek, Latin and English Old, Middle and ModernIt is a complex picture, depending on some understanding of how the sounds for which the letters stand are each made - what the tongue and throat are doing, and how changes in that can chance pronunciations, sometimes resulting in tectonic shifts which leave their traces in systematically wrong-seeming spellings. Bate is very good at giving the reader enough to understand his point, but without turning the book into an instruction manual. (It may help in though, if you can read the book in a place where you can say the sounds out loud.)

The story reminded me, somewhat, of archeology or geology, a process of unearthing layers of deposits giving clues to speech and spelling. For English, that means repeated outside influences from Norse, Norman French, Latin, the invention of printing and centuries of social and political change. These resulted in consistent patterns which can still be traced in modern spellings (though every rule has an exception, as do many of the exceptions). It's a fascinating story and the conclusions are often deeply satisfying as some apparent anomaly becomes clear.

If I've made all that sound terribly dry, it's not. This is a fun book with some amazing facts hidden away. After reading it you will, for example, know more about some of the hieroglyphs you may see on Only Connect.  Why Q Needs U would make an excellent Christmas present for any word nerds in the family, as well as potentially helping settle family arguments, if your family is prone to argue about things like "s" or "z" spellings or why "W" sounds like "double U".

Or, indeed, why Q needs U at all.

Strongly recommended.

For more information about Why Q Needs U, see the publisher's website here.

Review - The Sound of the Dark by Daniel Church

The Sound of the Dark

Daniel Church
Angry Robot, 28 October 2025
Available as: PB, 400pp, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781915998408

I'm grateful to the publisher for sending me a copy of The Sound of the Dark to consider for review.

Though this book is set during the summer, it would make great reading (and a great present!) for a landscape-horror to consider at this, the darkest time of the year. In particular, The Sound of the Dark, as its name suggests, makes superb use of sound as a channel and metaphor for the insinuation of evil. 

It therefore feels very current - the true-crime podcaster in fiction is fast, I think, becoming the modern day equivalent of those slightly fusty academics MR James wrote about - the ones who come across an oddity in a manuscript from the previous century, investigate it... and suffer the consequences.

Whether "the consequences" arise from the malice of an evil spirit, or more mundane human wickedness, or a combination of both, there's something about the hapless investigator pulling an unravelling strand from the past and trying to establish what really happened that provides the perfect gateway to horror. That feeling one has that they are in for trouble and should draw back - but knowing that they won't, and waiting and wanting to see exactly how bad it gets.

And in The Sound of the Dark, that's very bad indeed.

With folk horror vibes, Church's new novel focusses first on a murder-suicide that took place in the 80s when a troubled artist destroyed first his family and then himself. He'd been poking around in a disused RAF station, Warden Fell. 

(Who was the warden, we might wonder. Against what were they on guard?)

Forty years later, podcaster Cally Darker stumbles across Tony Mathias's story. Darker, herself troubled and in a relationship with a controlling boyfriend, digs enthusiastically into what records she can find. I had a distinct sense that Cally was using Tony's story to escape from her own rather grim reality. She is an engaging and, as the story proceeds, increasingly brave and determined young woman, but she certainly has Issues. (Kudos to Church for telling us just enough about her family background to give the outlines there, but not holding up the story by providing too much detail).

Ultimately, Cally lays hands on some relics of Tony's life that will cast light on those events in 1983. Or perhaps, cast darkness. Because there is a sense of a taint here - a darkness at noon - as something ancient and amiss seems to be at work even under the midsummer sun. This subversion of the usual horror conventions only makes things seem more eerie, more out of joint, as we see the ancient horror beginning to take form, or rather, as we hear it - this book is haunted by a whispering, by an insinuating quality of sonic presence. Church captures that sense you sometimes get alone in a house, or awake in the small hours, when there's a noise and you lie there trying to work out what it was, half convincing yourself there wasn't a sound at all, even though you know there was.

Take that, energise it, and bring into broad daylight and you'll appreciate how Cally begins to feel as she discovers more and more about Tony, tracks down witnesses to his life and deaf, and begin to listen to his tapes. It's a creeping horror that coexists with the very mundane. And she still has to navigate that mundane - the nasty boyfriend, the lack of a job and money, her flaky mental health 9could all this just be some sort of episode?) 

In the best traditions of folk horror, everything is under threat, but it's not clear how....

For more information about The Sound of the Dark, see the publisher's website here.

Review - The Christmas Cracker Killer by Alexandra Benedict

The Christmas Cracker Killer

Alexandra Benedict
Simon & Schuster,  6 November 2026
Available as: HB, 304pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781398532212

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of The Christmas Cracker Killer to consider for review.

Christmas is all about tradition, and one of my favourite traditions is to read a puzzle thriller from Alexandra Benedict. Her latest, The Christmas Cracker Killer, is set in a remote (but luxury!) hotel on a Scottish island, where a bunch of guests are stranded over the festive season - with a killer among them.

The book features Edie O’Sullivan, crossword setter and amateur detective, her partner Riga, and her adopted grandson Sean, who we met in The Christmas Jigsaw Murders. This time they're off home turf as winners of coveted places at the launch of the Aster Castle Hotel. But someone, it seems, wants to launch a rather different enterprise - one involving murder and mayhem...

The Christmas Cracker Killer is a perfect slice of cosy Christmas crime, with a varied and suspicious cast of guests assembled to attract guilt (and death). Benedict conveys the different personalities of this crew brilliantly, wasting no time, as they arrive on the hotel's yacht, in sketching personalities and animosities, hinting at dark secrets, and giving fragments of history. We sympathise, for example, with Mara, the manager of the hotel, who's rather put-upon by her parents, the main investors; we boo at the unpleasant banker and the savage hotel reviewer; we note the tensions between some guests, and the hints of mystery attached to others.

Most of all, we thrill at the sections written from the killer's point of view (and reread them, looking for clues as to their identity).

Then, even before the first death, the puzzles erupt, with potential clues appearing in crackers as Benedict hints at who the killer will be, while scattering red herrings (literally - "swimming fish" play a big part here). She's also warned us that her own puzzles are contained in the text (some of them have answers at the end) underlying the main theme. 

The action proceeds at a good pace with crime story cliches both fulfilled and subverted (I loved the closing reveal of the killer's identity) and, suitably for Christmas, a hint of the ghost story.

Necessarily this book foregrounds the glitzy guests, the so carefully curated jolliness and the Christmas cheer laid on by the bucketful. (The descriptions of the food made me hungry!) But it also gives us the other side of things - the hard working staff attempting to deliver a luxury experience, even as things go badly, scarily wrong (it's good to see that hard work recognised). However, when all is said and done, it's down to Edie and Sean to solve the crime and stop the killer. Doing that requires a delve into the pasts of everyone on the island, as well as the killer's clues. But as Edie and Riga are among the guests, they may not be the impartial observers we expect - the killer may have business with them.

As well as enjoying Christmas crime, I also enjoy stories set in hotels slightly out of season (is that weird or just niche?) There's something about a hotel as backdrop that can be both familiar - hotels have lots of similarities - and strange - places that should be public, bustling, are a bit uncanny when mostly empty, I think? And once normality is shattered by a killing, everything is different. It can make for an atmospheric and chewy story and Benedict makes full use of that.

Strongly recommended.

For more information about The Christmas Cracker Killer, see the publisher's website here.