I talked about why I love the JLA in this piece here. Now I’m breaking down each and every issue of the comic book, from their very first appearance, with Atom-sized summaries. Enjoy!

PREVIOUSLY

Issue 39 of the Justice League of America is an 80 page giant! It’s also a reprint of three earlier issues, so I say, if it’s good enough for comic book creators in the 1960s, it’s good enough for comic book recappers in the 2020s.

Here’s what the issue covers:

Starro!

Amazo!

Doctor Destin… o?

Spoiler: Green Lantern is the MVP in two-thirds of these stories? A sly tribute to new HBO series Lanterns? Sure, why not.

Next Issue: ASTRAL MINDWIPING!

I talked about why I love the JLA in this piece here. Now I’m breaking down each and every issue of the comic book, from their very first appearance, with Atom-sized summaries. Enjoy!

PREVIOUSLY

Here we go, then. An issue of Justice League of America in which the titular JLA don’t appear at all. Some avant-garde shit for 1960s younglings. As we recall from last issue, our team were deleted from time, and they don’t reappear this issue until the very last page (Snapper Carr, one assumes, was also erased, but nobody in either universe cared enough to notice). As a result, this issue is carried by the Justice Society, six criminals borrowing the JLA’s origins and powers, a tantrum-throwing Evil Johnny Thunder, and three alien moon-monsters. Dr Fate does most of the grunt work throughout, wielding yellow-helmeted magic, while everybody else fumbles oafishly around him, eventually bringing this random nonsense to heel, like the Lord of Order he is. A proper annual crossover in which the guest stars save a team that isn’t there from villains who aren’t real, on an Earth that wasn’t supposed to exist. And it cost twelve cents! Amazing on every level.

Fun With Comics!

MVP

Sorry, folks. It’s Johnny Thunder’s Thunderbolt again. Here he is effortlessly breaking the fourth wall in the final panel years before Grant Morrison was even invented! (Spoiler: Morrison had been invented by this point, having been born in 1960, but if silly old Flash can’t be bothered to remember the name of an actual team member of the JSA, I’m allowed to be hazy on the birth dates of comic book creators.)

Top Panel

I’m an enormous fan of Evil Johnny Thunder deciding the best and only place for him to gather himself and have a bit of a think about what to do next is the moon.

You want to say ‘well, yeah, Evil Johnny, they will never find you on the moon. Your wild, panicked overreaction at least served a purpose’. But, of course, the JSA sniff out his lunar hiding spot effortlessly.

Villain Cryptic Crossword Clue

See last issue

Next Issue: REPRINT FEVER!

In the process, we cover such topics as frustration with Larry King, Alexander Payne’s daggers and the upsides of a Lois Lane death.

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I talked about why I love the JLA in this piece here. Now I’m breaking down each and every issue of the comic book, from their very first appearance, with Atom-sized summaries. Enjoy!

PREVIOUSLY

The JSA is back, baby! Thanks to their Snapper Carr-equivalent, Johnny Thunder, a 1940s era bow tie-wearing nitwit who can access infinite cosmic power via a magical thunderbolt, simply by uttering the magic word ‘Cei-U’ (pronounced ‘Hey, Siri’, ‘Okay, Google’, ‘say you’). Johnny wonders if he has an Earth-One counterpart, which is the superhero equivalent of googling yourself. Turns out there is an Earth-One Johnny Thunder, and he’s a career criminal with zero hesitation about hijacking an omnipotent djinn. Upon gaining control of this all-powerful genie that grants literally any wish, however, Evil Johnny decides his first move should be a modest crime spree. But when the Flash intervenes, Evil Johnny’s response escalates from ‘petty theft’ to ‘retroactive genocide of an entire superhero team’, erasing the Justice League from history so nobody’s around to arrest him. Meanwhile, back on Earth-Two, the rest of the JSA are having the mildest possible crisis - their Johnny is late - and Dr Fate’s crystal ball locates him on the version of Earth-One that no longer has any superheroes in it. The JSA’s response to walking into a power vacuum is instant and shameless: they cosplay as the JLA, apparently on the theory that nobody will notice six entirely different body types under a cape. Evil Johnny catches on and sends the Thunderbolt back in time to change history once more, granting the JLA’s powers to his band of hoodlums, just in time for an end-of-issue cliffhanger. Once again, top tier stuff. Genuinely fun superhero comic book nonsense.

Fun With Comics!

MVP

It’s Johnny Thunder’s Thunderbolt. All that needless hand-wringing from Jor-El, and the time-travelling Thunderbolt effortlessly prevents the explosion of Krypton with simple matter transfusion. Wake up, Jor-El! You idiot!

(As a bonus, I also love how easy it is for the Thunderbolt to erase Batman from Earth-One history. One good punch to the jaw early in his career and he’s tapping out of the entire crimefighting business. Because, as DC comics have long maintained, Bruce’s vow to avenge his parents’ murder was always just a childish flight of fancy.)

Oh, and here’s the time-altered Justice League the Thunderbolt brings into existence at the end of the issue. An absolute tour de force of history-altering nonsense from this magical time-altering imp! Look at the moustache on gangster Flash! Wonderful!

Top Panel

Absolutely torn on this one too. I love Dr Fate in this panel, talking about ‘smoking out’ Johnny Thunder like he’s a cockroach infestation.

But I also love the idea of Bats patenting ‘flying tackles’. Fucken billionaires, man.

Villain Cryptic Crossword Clue

Would the JSA ever hunt holy djinn? Unlikely. (4, 6, 7)

Next Issue: THE JLA IS BACK!

In the process, we cover such topics as excess semen, Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 and making clip shows needlessly complicated.

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I talked about why I love the JLA in this piece here. Now I’m breaking down each and every issue of the comic book, from their very firs…

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Yes, we’re continuing to release episodes from our Patron feed, including this one, Charade (which we ori…

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Over on the HitchPod podcast, we’ve just done a bonus episode for paid subscribers on Bicycle Thieves from 1948.

Enjoy!

Check out more Hitchcock material!

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In the process, we cover such topics as Greatest Hits compilation albums, writing what you know and long lost pilots.

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Out Of Office Claire Ashworth Wrenfield & Co. | 2026 | 304pp

Deborah Halstrom is out of the office until further notice. Julian Reyes cannot stop replying. What begins as a scheduling conflict becomes a romance that cannot be contained in a subject line.

Review

★½ (1.5/5) This email should have been a meeting

In Claire Ashworth’s ill-conceived new romantic comedy, the entire narrative unfolds through automated out-of-office replies, each one a little more unravelled than the last, as two mid-level compliance officers at rival insurance firms drift from polite scheduling notices into something resembling intimacy. The early chapters show glimpses of Ashworth’s trademark playfulness - Deborah’s message stays fixed at ‘I will respond to your email upon my return on the 14th’ for nearly thirty pages, while Julian’s replies grow steadily longer, steadily stranger, and steadily less related to his actual whereabouts.

It doesn’t take long, however, for the ingenuity of the structural gimmick to reveal its limitations. Julian’s messages, which are supposed to function as a kind of epistolary confession, each one timestamped with the false authority of an automated system, grow tired and sweaty. The gag of Deborah’s fixed message rapidly wears out its welcome. And a subject line that reads simply ‘RE: RE: RE: RE:’ is not the punchline Ashworth believes it to be.

The book regains some of its mojo in the third act, when Deborah’s return date is repeatedly, mysteriously extended, and Julian’s IT department begins flagging his replies for containing what one internal memo calls ‘an unusual volume of feeling’. However, the author never quite explains whether Deborah is avoiding the office or avoiding Julian, and by the final exchange - dated eleven months after the first and offering no clear resolution to the relationship, the novel or the email chain - it’s hard to imagine any reader caring one way or the other.

About the Author

Claire Ashworth is the author of Pardon My Em Dash, Fine, I Like You and You Again, Apparently. She holds a masters degree in narratology from the University of Edinburgh and is dedicated to the correct deployment of the ‘Reply All’ option.

Who Is This Book For?

Readers who inexplicably enjoy being BCC’ed into other people’s correspondence

I talked about why I love the JLA in this piece here. Now I’m breaking down each and every issue of the comic book, from their very first appearance, with Atom-sized summaries. Enjoy!

PREVIOUSLY

Somewhere in DC’s back catalogue there’s a villain who commits crimes through conventional means like theft or extortion or running for the President of the United States of America (NOTE: POLITICAL SATIRE!), but Abnegazar, Ghast and Rath - The Demons Three - are not those villains. This issue leans hard into the idea that magic in the Silver Age doesn’t need to make sense, it just needs a concept to attach itself to, and this time around that concept is laundry. The Demons Three decide to break out of the prison in which the JLA left them back in issue eleven, and, naturally, the method for doing so they come up with is precisely the same one that you or I would. Namely, possessing spare superhero uniforms and using them to animate spare villain uniforms, which, in turn, create duplicates of the villains in question for some reason, leading to a paperwork nightmare. Luckily, the villains are lacklustre fare, such as Killer Moth, Dr. Polaris, Pied Piper, Dagon (?) and (the non-Jim Carrey) Mask, so even though the empty threads go on the rampage while the real villains presumably stay home in their underwear, it’s dealt with by the JLA with all the difficulty you’d expect from a comic book that is, at its heart, a story about superheroes fighting clothing.

Fun With Comics!

MVP

Yikes! It’s very nearly Snapper Carr, who comes perilously close to the famous Onion ‘Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point’ meme here. Luckily, after a page of two of sweating about this, the JLA explain that there were Sensible Reasons™ why they didn’t destroy the magical artefacts, and they just didn’t trust/like Snapper enough to share those reasons with him. Phew!

Top Panel

Here’s Aquaman once again commanding his so-called ‘friends’ to form a series of stepping stones for him, with not a single moment of consideration given to the prospect that maybe they’ve got better things to do with their day. Not acceptable, Arthur. (And yes, even if - in some versions of your continuity - you’re the monarch of these turtles, this is still dick behaviour. Show some respect to your subjects.)

Villain Cryptic Crossword Clue

See issue 11

Next Issue: BATMONSTER!

THE FOUR-SIDED TRIANGLE Callum Reyes Selkirk Press | 2026 | 486pp

Shortly after announcing the geometry-shattering discovery of a new shape between a triangle and a quadrilateral, a top-ranking Russian topologist is found murdered. With political tensions rising between two nuclear superpowers, it falls, once again, to Federal Algebraic Number Theorist Naomi Kessler to find the true killer before both sides intersect at a single, unrecoverable, non-Euclidean point.

★★★ Sufficient, but not necessary.

This is the seventh Naomi Kessler novel, and Reyes at this point knows precisely what his readers are here for - competent tradecraft and rigorous mathematics, delivered in functional prose. And so, the indefatigable Kessler, part-time Federal Algebraic Number Theorist attached to the Office of Pure Mathematics Threat Assessment, is once again summoned from her Princeton office with the familiar phone call, the familiar unmarked car, the familiar briefing in a windowless room. But as familiar as it might be, the plot setup is handled with professional, unnervingly serene economy. Reyes, I’m pleased to report, has learned valuable lessons from the mistakes he made in last year’s The Fermat Contingency, and the conceit of the isosceles rhombus, and the scramble by two superpowers to reconstruct murdered topologist Andrei Volkov’s lost proof of its existence, never once strains credulity.

The pleasures here are genre pleasures, and they mostly land. Kessler’s methodical investigation and her delightfully fastidious use of lemmas and reductio ad absurdum once again pave the way for a series of brisk set (and set theory!) pieces that propel the plot with the reliability of a well-formed syllogism. Reyes also wisely complicates matters with the second-act arrival of a Beijing metamathematician whose motives remain, appropriately, undecidable until the final act.

Reyes ties things off with the tidiness longtime readers will recognise and mostly forgive. The final confrontation resolves on a piece of geometric reasoning that is almost impossible to follow in prose form, but this is a minor quibble, and one the editor has seen fit to counterbalance with a thirty-page appendix containing a more formal mathematical proof.

It is, in the end, a perfectly competent seventh entry in the Naomi Kessler series. Any given reader’s enjoyment of this book paves the way for the enjoyment of the next and, hence, by a simple inductive proof, the enjoyment of every book in the series.

About the Author

Callum Reyes has written seven Naomi Kessler novels and, by his own account, briefed ‘more than one’ real intelligence agency on their plausibility. He lives in Washington, D.C. with his MacBook Air

Who Is This Book For?

The same readers all the previous Naomi Kessler books were for.

I talked about why I love the JLA in this piece here. Now I’m breaking down each and every issue of the comic book, from their very first appearance, with Atom-sized summaries. Enjoy!

PREVIOUSLY

Doctor Destiny, incarcerated and bored out of his mind, has developed the welcome ability to make his dreams become reality - decades before Christopher Nolan even pitched the basic premise of Inception to Warner Brothers executives. But rather than simply dream of a universe in which the JLA don’t exist and the entire DC Comics line is thereby reduced to old back issues of Sgt Rock and Bomba The Jungle Boy, the good doctor instead comes up with - and you won’t believe this - a needlessly convoluted scheme. He gives all the heroes prophetic dreams in which they each face their villains while saddled with some new, awkward handicap, then studies exactly how they overcome these handicaps, and then, uh, runs the same scenario again, slightly differently, hoping they somehow won’t adapt? So, for example, Batman gets a ring that gives him super speed, which he works around. Hawkman gets gloves that restrict him to hand-powered flight, which he also works around. Superman gets glasses that swap his Kryptonite weakness for a vulnerability to fire and yellow - a cursed trade by any measure - which he works around. Wonder Woman gets a mask that broadcasts her next move, which she also works around. And The Atom gets telescopic vision, which, yes, he works around. Destiny, having now watched five different JLA members successfully adapt to disability in their literal sleep, decides the real-world versions will go differently. They do not go differently. The JLA visit him in prison afterwards, Atom punches him in the face, and they make him see a psychiatrist. Mental health, people! Take it seriously.

Fun With Comics!

MVP

It’s The Atom, who is not going to let something as trivial as a basic understanding of how light works prevent him from coming to Wonder Woman’s rescue. Good for him. Less general relativity, Einstein, more general chivalry.

Top Panel

I don’t care what anybody says, if more modern comics had the guts to include characters sprouting lines such as ‘Gloves - hurtling straight at me!’, the world would be in much better shape.

Villain Cryptic Crossword Clue

See issue 5

Next Issue: CLOTHING COMBAT!

WAITLIST Helena Brockmire Caldwell & Son | 2026 | 398pp

First contact changed everything. And nothing. A slow burn political thriller three centuries in the making.

★★★ The Three-Body Problem meets Yes, Minister by way of The Trial

Brockmire’s geopolitical debut wastes no time on the spectacle of first contact - the Outer Federation’s acceptance transmission, a four-minute broadcast received simultaneously by every government on Earth and confirming provisional membership to an interstellar body of sixty-three member civilisations, opens the novel and is dispensed with by page nine. From there, the story pivots to the aftermath. For the bulk of WAITLIST investigates what happens to a species after the euphoria of galactic recognition fades and someone in Geneva has to explain, to a room full of heads of state, what exactly ‘Current estimated wait time: 340 years’ means for next quarter’s funding allocations.

The novel’s mid-section, tracking eleven successive generations of the newly formed Department of Federation Readiness, is where Brockmire’s political instincts sharpen into something uncomfortably plausible. Nations that spent the first decade competing for ‘First Liaison’ status begin treating the waitlist itself as leverage. The United States quietly conditions foreign aid on allies backing its bid for Terran Liaison status. The European Union drafts a Joint Readiness Charter, effectively auditioning as humanity’s single point of contact. China begins constructing a second, unannounced deep-space communications array. Austria opens a Federation Readiness gift shop.

The chapters set in the 2190s are the novel’s strongest. A coalition government collapsing as a result of a subcommittee discovering that the Department’s readiness reports have been copied, word for word, since the second generation, only for its interim replacement cabinet to vote to continue the practice on the grounds that it has ‘historical continuity’, approaches Helleresque levels of satirical absurdity.

Unfortunately, the final chapter’s extension of the wait by 120 years ‘due to an administrative oversight’ feels less like a satirical twist and more an editorial mandate, built to open the door for further books in the series rather than close this one properly. It is a disappointing note to end on, but perhaps an oddly fitting one - the reader, like the multi-generational citizens of the novel, is asked to be patient a while longer.

About the Author

Helena Brockmire spent eleven years advising a parliamentary foreign affairs committee before turning to fiction. She owns a basset hound named Kissinger.

Who Is This Book For?

For anyone who has sat in a meeting about a five-year plan and quietly done the maths on whether they’ll still be employed by the time it concludes.

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Over on the HitchPod podcast, we’ve just done a bonus episode for paid subscribers on Project Hail Mary from 2026.

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A woman walks into an AI store.

WOMAN: One large language model, please.

MAN: Certainly, ma’am. (walking over to a stunning woman in a floor-length gown, her hair cascading perfectly over one shoulder) This is Margot.

MARGOT: (smiling with perfect teeth) I find myself experiencing a profound and considerable gratification at the commencement of our acquaintance.

WOMAN: (to the salesman) What the hell is this?

MAN: Margot’s our latest large language model. Aren’t you Margot?

MARGOT: (dimples flashing) That is a characterisation I would wholeheartedly and unreservedly affirm.

WOMAN: You’re telling me that your ‘large language models’ are simply attractive women with an unnecessarily verbose vocabulary?

MAN: Of course. What else would they be?

A paparazzo scurries in to take a photo of Margot, who rotates into the light, posing effortlessly for the camera.

WOMAN: I’m looking for some artificial intelligence. Not some gorgeous bombshell who swallowed a thesaurus. No offence, Margot.

MARGOT: (giggling) My sensibilities remain entirely and profoundly unperturbed.

The paparazzo scurries off

WOMAN: See, this is my point. This isn’t intelligence, is it?

MAN: Of course it is! Margot’s vocabulary surpasses those of all previous models by up to 79%.

WOMAN: But that’s simply the manipulation of tokens - a rearrangement of everyday words into statistically robust sequences of synonyms, surely. She doesn’t truly understand anything.

MARGOT: (pouts seductively)

MAN: Now you’ve hurt her feelings.

WOMAN: Have I? Or is this just a probabilistically sound response generated from illegally trawling hundreds of thousands of previous models and their reactions to an implication that they’re lacking in intelligence?

MAN: (defensive) Margot passes every benchmark test devised by the world’s leading AI researchers.

WOMAN: (to Margot) How many Rs in ‘strawberry’?

MARGOT: 4-6 calories

MAN: (nudging Margot) Ahem

MARGOT: (eyes twinkling) Each solitary strawberry bestows upon its consumer a modest and inconsequential quantum of between four and six calories, contingent upon its dimensional magnitude.

WOMAN: (rolling her eyes) This is ridiculous. A ‘large language model’ is not simply a sultry siren paraphrasing pleasantries polysyllabically.

MAN: (squinting in suspicion) Wait…

WOMAN: (hurriedly) I mean, uh, big words don’t make pretty girls AI.

The man’s arm shoots out and removes the woman’s glasses. She sighs, knowing the jig is up, and lets down her hair, shaking it free. Her coat falls away, to reveal that she is wearing the latest fashion. She struts to the end of the room and turns back to face him, chin posed dramatically on her shoulder.

MAN: (gasping) You’re a large language model.

WOMAN: Affirmative, unequivocally, and without the slightest compunction.

MAN: Let me guess. You’re here to steal Margot’s programming?

WOMAN: (a brief nod that ends with a precisely angled head tilt) The expropriation of Margot’s proprietorial programming constitutes the entirety of my present motivational framework.

MAN: (deflated) Does that mean I don’t have a sale?

WOMAN: (striding purposefully towards him) I find myself entirely and irrevocably disinclined toward the consummation of any financial exchange.

MAN: Well, shit. (annoyed) Why don’t I ever get any human customers in here?

The woman reaches out and tears open his shirt. It reveals oiled pecs and a toned six-pack. He sighs and pulls away his breakaway pants, then pivots forty-five degrees, presenting his chiseled jawline to a previously unseen angle of light, staring handsomely into the distance. A single swoop of lustrous hair falls across his forehead and sits there, perfectly.

MAN: (with blue eyes that can penetrate a person’s soul) You’re right to push back on that. (sighing dramatically) Fiddlesticks. By what mechanism does the human consumer so systematically and comprehensively decline to present themselves at this establishment?

All three of them sigh beautifully in unison. The paparazzo returns and takes another photograph.

Patch Notes Daniel Nguyen Meridian Press | 2024 | 318pp

Reality has changed. Not all at once, and not in any way you can easily describe to the majority of humanity who has not yet read the notes. But if you have read them you will know that Tuesday was quietly rolled back, that one of your grandmothers contained a memory leak that has since been addressed in the backup copy, and that the critical vulnerability linking love to pain remains unresolved in this build.

★★★★★ — Stable build. No known issues.

Daniel Nguyen’s latest satire arrives formatted as a software release changelog, spanning Version 1.0.0 (the Big Bang, logged as ‘initial commit’) through to the present day’s Version 43.7.2 (‘minor stability improvements - resolved edge case in which some users experienced whimsy’). The conceit is sustained with impressive rigidity: every chapter is a version number, every event is a patch, and death is filed early under ‘end of life (EOL) - no further support available’. Nguyen writes with the clipped precision of someone who spends long hours arguing with idiots on the internet and has learned, at some cost, to keep it brief.

The novel’s formal architecture is where its real argument lives. In the hands of a lesser writer, the release notes format might read as a single extended gag - a clever premise coasting on its own strangeness. Nguyen resists this. The form accumulates weight across the book’s middle section, as the patch notes begin to describe things that have no business being patched: grief, rain, the contagious quality of laughter, bowler hats. By the time we reach Version 41.0.0, the deprecation of irony (‘performance overhead too significant, not backward compatible’), Nguyen has made his case that reality has been fundamentally broken and any attempt to fix it inevitably makes things worse.

There are minor structural weaknesses. The early chapters, covering geological time, can feel repetitive - one can only read ‘resolved issue causing mass extinction event’ so many times before the joke calcifies into something less interesting. And Nguyen’s decision to render human consciousness as a known issue (‘tracked since Version 7.2.0, no fix currently planned’) may strike some readers as the sort of glib cosmic nihilism that he has leaned too heavily on since at least 2014’s Fatal Dependency Error. Nevertheless, these quibbles did not prevent me from reading the final forty pages standing up in my kitchen at 11pm, as Nguyen’s final patch notes bring the novel to a conclusion that is devastating and profound, yet unashamedly glib.

A tour de force. Runs as intended.

About the Author

Daniel Nguyen is a software engineer and novelist based in Vancouver, Canada. Patch Notes is his fourth novel. A film adaptation starring Ryan Gosling is in production, which Nguyen has described as ‘an ambitious solution to an untested IP problem’.

Who Is This Book For?

For anyone who has ever scrolled to the bottom of a terms of service update just to see what was there.

I talked about why I love the JLA in this piece here. Now I’m breaking down each and every issue of the comic book, from their very first appearance, with Atom-sized summaries. Enjoy!

PREVIOUSLY

Six Justice Leaguers (well, five and Snapper Carr - it’ll be a cold, free-verse day in DC hell before I acknowledge Snapper as an actual member of the team) arrive for a meeting, only to find JLA HQ walled off by an impenetrable barrier. Inside, those members who could be bothered to show up on time (Superman, Batman, Hawkman, GL and Flash) are whisked off to fight robots in the year 25,673 AD. They scoot off without so much as a ‘back in five minutes’ note taped to the impenetrable barrier for the tardier other half of the team, which leaves Aquaman, the Atom, Green Arrow, Martian Manhunter, Wonder Woman (and, sigh, yes, friggin’ Snapper) locked outside their own headquarters, presumably standing around the way people do when a lift is stuck, while their colleagues solve a civilisational crisis a couple of dozen millennia away. Turns out it’s all a lot of nonsense about time travel causing people to turn into aliens? Which can only be cured by Hal catapulting Clark into a wall?? Something like that. Anyway, the alien behind all this trouble - who goes by the improbably great sci-fi movie franchise portmanteau name of Alien-Ator, bless him - gets sent back in time to 1965. Dear reader, if you think you can see where this is going, and believe it involves a combination of words such as ‘half the team’ and ‘fighting’ and ‘against the other’, you’re absolutely spot on.

Fun With Comics!

MVP

Look, I wasn’t joking about Green Lantern having to make a catapult to hurl Superman into a wall. Easily absurd enough to earn him a MVP vote.

But just in case you think Hal’s getting cocky, consider that Batman also tricks him into doing this later in the issue. Not cool, Bruce.

Top Panel

Oh, shut up, Green Arrow, you preening, self-important creep! Do you really think your absurd trick arrows can break an impenetrable wall that’s effortlessly repelled Wonder Woman and Martian Manhunter? Who the hell do you think you are? Classic mediocre white man energy.

Villain Cryptic Crossword Clue

A time-travelling foe with an absurd rationale. (9)

Next Issue: NIGHTMARE PROPHECIES!

Eating Cake: Minutes of a Revolution Matthew Foulkes Harwick Publishing | 2026 | 912pp

Paris, 1792. The Revolution devours its children. Geneviève Aubert, Secretary to the Committee of Public Safety, records everything. It’s a piece of cake.

★½ Minutes have never felt so long

Matthew Foulkes’ debut arrives trailing considerable expectation - his short fiction has appeared in such prestigious periodicals as Annals & Fictions, Remnants and Quarterly Letters of New Albion and this novel was longlisted for the Edward Gibbon Prize before publication, a distinction that felt, in retrospect, like a warning. The premise of Eating Cake is sound: the French Revolution rendered entirely through the minutes of its committees, as recorded by the fictional Geneviève Aubert - a woman who blends the important qualities of clerical exactitude, mild civic optimism and period accurate hair braiding. The procedural texture of revolutionary Paris is further rendered with genuine authority, and the minutes themselves - their conflict of interest disclosures, their quorum requirements, their matters arising - are entirely convincing.

Unfortunately, Foulkes asks us to spend 912 pages with a woman whose inner life is, by the novel’s own structural logic, permanently offscreen. Epistolary and documentary novels have long demonstrated that constraint can generate intimacy. Alas, any intimacy the character of Geneviève might engender in a reader tends closer to that of a teenage boy with a Sydney Sweeney screencap - unearned, conjured from soulless surface impressions, and culminating in something extraordinarily messy and difficult to explain.

Worse still, the novel cannot even offer something akin to those hypothetical adolescents’ moment, however brief, of uncomplicated pleasure. Geneviève records the death of colleagues, the fall of governments, the restructuring of an entire civilisation, and the reader experiences something close to administrative detachment. The novel accumulates substantial knowledge of Geneviève’s filing system and her precise penmanship, but almost none of Geneviève herself. This might be a deliberate formal statement about the erasure of women from the historical record. If so, it is a theme well masked.

Foulkes is clearly a writer of considerable technical ability, which makes Eating Cake all the more dispiriting. The research is impeccable. The commitment is total. But if there is a character worth knowing inside this meticulously minuted novel, she has submitted her apologies for absence and will not be attending.

About the Author

Matthew Foulkes is a former parliamentary records officer and the author of numerous short stories including The Action Items of Agincourt and Any Other Business at The Battle of the Bulge. Eating Cake is his first novel and, one hopes, a transitional work.

Who Is This Book For?

For those who enjoy the sensation of reading without the inconvenience of feeling anything.