Gareth Ellis

Back to the Jungle: Loving Congo Just as Much the Second Time Around ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ I recently went back and re-read Congo, and I’m genuinely surprised by how much I still love it. Sometimes revisiting a book you loved years ago can be a bit risky—you worry the magic might not hold up, or that nostalgia did most of the work the first time around. But in this case, the opposite happened. If anything, I appreciated it even more the second time.

My 5-star review of "Congo" by Michael Crichton has just been published over on my website.

My review of the "Woolhaven" DLC for "Cult of the Lamb" has just been published over on my website.

A Big, Dumb, Bloody Good Time (With a Few Cracks Showing) ⭐⭐⭐⭐ This is my second read-through of Meg by Steve Alten, the first being about ten years ago. Back then, I gave it a full five stars without hesitation. It was fast, exciting, and exactly the kind of over-the-top creature feature I loved. Coming back to it now, with a bit more reading experience under my belt, I can see the seams a lot more clearly.

My 4-star review of "Meg" by Steve Alten has just been published over on my website.

Moonlighter 2 Item Price Guide: Max Profit, Happy Customers If you’ve spent any time in Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault, you’ll already know that running a shop is just as important as swinging a sword. Every dungeon run ends the same way: a backpack full of strange relics, a counter waiting to be stocked, and customers ready to judge your prices with a single raised eyebrow. Set them too high and you’ll scare people off.

My Item Price Guide for "Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault" has just been published over on my website.

My 4-star review of "A Hat Full of Sky" by Terry Pratchett has just been pubilshed over on my website.

My 5-star review of "Monstrous Regiment" by Terry Pratchett has just been published over on my website.

A Scrappy, Sharp-Edged Fairytale ⭐⭐⭐⭐ I’ll be honest: this one took me a little while to click with. Not in a bad way, exactly — more that I had to adjust my expectations. The opening didn’t immediately grab me in the way some Discworld stories do, and for a bit I felt like I was circling the edges of something rather than being fully pulled in.

My 4-star review of "The Wee Free Men" by Terry Pratchett has just been published over on my website.

Bending Minds and Reality ⭐⭐⭐⭐ I just finished There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm, and I have to say, it’s exactly the kind of weird that gets me excited about fiction. From the very first entries, there’s this uncanny, almost clinical tone that makes you feel like you’re reading a classified briefing rather than a story, and I absolutely loved that. It’s clever, unnerving, and often just bizarre enough to make you stop and think about how reality itself is being twisted around the narrative.

My 4-star review of "There Is No Antimemetics Division" by qntm has just been published over on my website.

Judgement Without a Jury ⭐⭐⭐⭐ I went into The Judge’s House expecting a quick, slightly dusty Victorian ghost story, and what I got was something far more quietly unsettling than I anticipated. It’s short, sure, but Stoker absolutely understands how to make brevity work in his favour here. There’s no wasted space, no meandering setup — just an atmosphere that tightens almost imperceptibly until you realise you’ve been holding your breath.

My 4-star review of "The Judge's House" by Bram Stoker has just been published over on my website.

History, Hoods, and Sam Vimes ⭐⭐⭐⭐ I’ve just finished Night Watch as part of my slow, slightly obsessive chronological read through the Discworld books, and I’ve got to say: this one really stuck with me. Not in a loud, laugh-out-loud-every-page way (though there’s still plenty of Pratchett humour), but in a heavier, more reflective sense that lingered after I closed the book. By the time you reach…

My 4-star review of "Night Watch" by Terry Pratchett has just been published over on my website.

Untitled ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is a perfect example of Terry Pratchett doing what he does best: taking something familiar, twisting it sideways, and using it to say something sharp, kind, and quietly profound. On the surface, it’s a playful riff on the Pied Piper story, complete with a talking cat, a gang of highly intelligent rats, and a scam that’s gone on just a bit too long.

My 5-star review of "The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents" by Terry Pratchett has just been published over on my website.

My 5-star review of "Jingo" by Terry Pratchett has just been published over on my website.

A Long Walk Nowhere ⭐⭐ I really wanted to like The North Woods, but by the time I finished it, I mostly felt tired and a bit let down. The biggest issue for me is the pacing. The story takes an absolute age to get going. There’s a lot of scene-setting, atmosphere-building, and slow circling around ideas, which isn’t a bad thing in theory — I enjoy a patient book when I know it’s heading somewhere.

My 2-star review of "The North Woods" by Douglass Hoover has just been published over on my website.

A Nostalgic Reread That Doesn’t Quite Hold Up ⭐⭐⭐ When I first read The Lost World years ago, I remember absolutely tearing through it. I loved it almost as much as Jurassic Park, which is no small thing. At the time, it felt like a worthy continuation: more dinosaurs, more danger, more of that Crichton techno-thriller momentum that made his work so addictive. It was fast, exciting, and felt smart enough to justify its own existence rather than just coasting on the name.

My 3-star review of "The Lost World" by Michael Crichton has just been published over on my website.

When the Monster Is the Most Honest Character There’s a particular kind of unease that creeps in when you realise the monster (or antagonist, the terms are often interchangeable) isn’t lying, and everyone else is. Not because the monster is gentle or fair or deserving of sympathy, but because it never pretends to be anything other than what it is. The fear doesn’t come from uncertainty, but from certainty.

My latest blog post, "When the Monster Is the Most Honest Character", has just been published over on my website.

The Thing By Mile Marker 19 Jack Mercer had been on the road since dusk, running a long-haul job that took him across a stretch of desert most truckers avoided when they could. The route wasn’t unsafe so much as unnerving. It had no towns for miles, no reliable radio signals, no lights except the ones you carried with you. Some nights the sky felt heavy with the kind of darkness that didn’t just obscure things—it swallowed them.

My new short story, "The Thing by Mile Marker 19", has just been published over on my wesbite.

A Creepy, Clever Reimagining That Gets Under Your Skin ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ T. Kingfisher’s What Moves the Dead quietly unsettles you rather than going for big shocks, and that’s exactly where it shines. A retelling of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, it keeps the bones of the original story but dresses them in something far stranger, funnier, and biologically grotesque. The atmosphere is thick from the outset. The Usher house feels wrong in that slow, creeping way — not immediately terrifying, but deeply unhealthy, like a place that’s been rotting for a long time and is finally starting to show it.

My 4-star review of "What Moves the Dead" by T. Kingfisher has just been published on my website.

A Classic I Should’ve Read Years Ago ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ I finally sat down with Invasion of the Body Snatchers by Jack Finney after years of loving both the 1956 and 1978 film adaptations, and I’m honestly kicking myself for not reading it sooner. I’ve watched those films so many times—each one with its own charm, its own atmosphere, its own flavour of creeping dread—but somehow I’d never made the jump back to the original novel.

My 5-star review of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" by Jack Finney has just been published over on my website.

Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault — Early Access Review Released in early access on 14 November 2025 on PC, Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault arrives as a confident, ambitious sequel that keeps the charm of the original while branching out in all the right ways. The most obvious change hits you straight away: the series has shifted from its cosy top-down pixel-art look to a more detailed 3D isometric style.

My review of "Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault" has just been published over on my website.

A Gripping Blend of Crime, History, and Psychological Depth ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ I first picked up His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet on the recommendation of one of my university lecturers. At the time, I was working on a project with some thematic overlap, and, honestly, it felt like perfect timing. I’m still working on that project now, and reading this novel has been both inspiring and a bit of a wake-up call in terms of the level of detail and narrative sophistication you can achieve.

My 5-star review of "His Bloody Project" by Graeme Macrae Burnet has just been published over on my website.

The Needle’s Last Light The lighthouse didn’t have a name anymore. Whatever plaque once declared it proud and useful had rotted away decades back, leaving only its jagged silhouette jutting from the rocks like a finger pointing at something no one else could see. Locals called it the Needle because it skewered the sky; thin, stark, and unnaturally tall against the slate-grey horizon of the northern sea.

A new short story "The Needle’s Last Light" has just been published over on my website.

A Restless, Haunting Journey Through Derry ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Stephen King’s Insomnia surprised me in the best way. I went in expecting a fairly straightforward horror story, but it turned into something much stranger and more ambitious. Ralph’s sleeplessness starts off feeling uncomfortably real—King captures that foggy, irritable, slightly surreal feeling of being overtired so well that I could practically feel my own eyelids twitching. As the story widens into something more cosmic, it keeps that grounded, human core, which is what makes it work.

My 4-star review of "Insomnia" by Stephen King has just been published over on my website.

Writing as Archaeology: Unearthing the Story Buried in Notes Writers are often told to keep every scrap of writing, every half-finished idea, every abandoned paragraph, no matter how insignificant or directionless it seems at the time. For years, I did this almost compulsively, stuffing note apps with fragments, saving hundreds of stray files on my laptop, keeping dialogue snippets on my phone, and hoarding concept sketches for novels that never escaped the planning stage.

My blog post "Writing as Archaeology: Unearthing the story buried in notes" has just been published over on my website.

A Slick, Modern Horror with Uneven Footing ⭐⭐⭐ Overall, I enjoyed Influencer by Adam Cesare, just not quite enough to bump it higher. The concept is great: a horror story rooted in internet fame, parasocial chaos, and the curated madness of influencer culture. Cesare leans into the world of streaming and online personas, blending satire and genuine menace. When the horror elements surface, they’re energetic and entertaining, the sort of scenes that make you feel like you’re watching a livestream spiral completely out of control.

My 3-star review of "Influencer" by Adam Cesare has just been published over on my website.

The Archive – Eight: SIGNAL // AFTERLIGHT The transmission was faint — weaker than static, buried under cosmic hiss and radiation storms. It should never have been detected. And yet, the SSV Calypso caught it. A single thread of data pulsing across the void, repeating every nineteen minutes: ECHO_402 — SYSTEM STABLE — AWAITING INPUT No one knew what it meant. The coordinates led to the edge of a dead sector, orbiting the collapsed remnants of a black star.

The final chapter of my short story "The Archive" has just been published over on my website.

Decently Readable, But Mostly Meh ⭐️⭐️⭐️ I’m honestly not quite sure what to say about Morsels by Abe Moss. It’s one of those books that isn’t bad at all — the writing’s solid, the pacing works fine — but for some reason it just feels very… average. “Meh” really sums it up. I didn’t dislike it, but I never felt properly invested either. The premise has potential, and there are moments where it almost clicks, a creepy scene here, an unsettling bit of tension there, but it never fully comes together in a way that leaves a lasting impression.

My 3-star review of "Morsels" by Abe Moss has just been published over on my website.

The Ghost of the First Draft: How the Earliest Version of Your Story Haunts All Revisions That Follow I’ve just finished the first draft of my current work-in-progress, a biography-horror hybrid that’s consumed more of my thoughts than I’d like to admit and is sure to consume more. It’s a strange, unsettling project that blurs the boundary between truth and fiction, and somewhere in that blur, I’ve found myself trapped between the two as well. Finishing a first draft should feel triumphant, but instead, I feel watched by it.

My latest blog post, The Ghost of the First Draft, has just been published over on my website.

A Wickedly Funny Murder in the Big House ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Dead Famous by Ben Elton is one of those books that takes a little while to find its rhythm. The opening feels like you’ve been dropped straight into an episode of Big Brother — full of big personalities, forced banter, and that strange mix of boredom and spectacle that reality TV does so well. It’s a slow start, and at first, I wasn’t sure if the satire would outstay its welcome.

My 4-star review of "Dead Famous" by Ben Elton has just been published over on my website.

The Archive – Chapter Seven: Juno There is no air here. Only rhythm. My breath matches the pulse of the corridors. My heartbeat echoes through the walls. Every step I take reverberates back at me, delayed, distorted, as though the ship itself were trying to mimic me — or remind me that it no longer needs me to move. I have stopped counting doors. There’s no point.

Chapter Seven of my short story "The Archive" has just been published over on my website.

Warm, Weird, and Wonderfully Mortimer ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ I absolutely loved The Hotel Avocado by Bob Mortimer — it’s one of those books that makes you laugh out loud, grin like an idiot, then unexpectedly tug at your heartstrings. From the very first page, Mortimer’s voice comes through loud and clear: dry, surreal, and oddly comforting. He’s got this rare knack for making even the strangest situations feel completely normal, and that’s exactly what makes this story so brilliant.

My 5-star review of "The Hotel Avacado" by Bob Mortimer has just been published over on my website.