Over the years, I’ve not really read many non-fiction books about medieval history. I tried to read a few when I was a young adult but always gave up on them because I found them far too dry for me to get any enjoyment out of. It’s a shame because it’s not as though I’m not curious about that era of history. Warrior Monks did not have that problem at all though. While it is possible that I might simply have a greater appetite for work like this now that I am a little older, I think a big part of it is that it’s written in a highly engaging way that even manages to capture a little humour – there were two or three times it made me genuinely laugh out loud.

The book covers the history of the Knights Hospitaller in Britain. For those not in the know, the Hospitallers were a Catholic military order and they were active around the world for hundreds of years. Although my own set of morals and values are far removed from those that the Hospitallers adhered to, something that I found quite impressive about this book was how it made me actually feel quite fond of them – and even had me rooting for them a few times. With a history that spans multiple centuries, the book covers a lot of ground and it’s pretty fascinating to see how the order behaved in different ways at different times, and how its influence grew and shrank. I remember feeling a little emotional when reading about how they lost a priory which had been their’s for practically all of their history.

What I enjoyed the most was reading about how they were effected by other historic events which were happening contemporaneously. One chapter dealt with a witchfinder accusing a prominent Hospitaller of witchcraft – it certainly endears you to them when you’re reading about how they’re challenging something as sinister as the witch trials. The absurd claims that were made about them and their associates are also mildly entertaining to look back on (despite the discomfort of knowing that other people lost their lives because of similar accusations). Their involvement with the War of the Roses was also especially interesting to me, along with the hard times they ultimately faced as a consequence of Henry VIII.

One particular strength of the book is that it doesn’t just focus on the big picture. Yes, you do get that as well, but wherever possible, it’s interspersed with human stories and anecdotes. Of course, there aren’t a huge number of these because of how distant the history is, but they make a huge difference and are often some of the most enjoyable bits – the story of the witchfinders is a perfect example of that. Knowing the personal struggles of a lot of the people involves in this history was a big part of what kept me invested throughout. It really breaths life into something which might otherwise feel quite detached from normal human existence.

The ending was great too – I don’t want to “spoil” anything (as much as you can spoil non-fiction history), but it explained the legacy of the Hospitallers that is still felt today. I thought it was an excellent way to illustrate the interconnected nature of things and that even medieval history is relevant to the world we live in today. It was also just quite touching after everything you’ve read about them by that point. If you’ve got any interest in the era, I definitely recommend giving this book a read.

Rating: 8.3/10

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Like many people, I mostly knew Nigel Kneale as a just a TV writer. I say “just” there specifically to mean “that was the only medium I knew him to write in” rather than to imply that TV writing is somehow lesser than prose writing. I loved Quatermass in particular, and hadn’t seen anything that he’d written that I didn’t like. I was delighted, then, when one of my very best friends gifted me Tomato Cain and Other Stories, which is a collection of Kneale’s short fiction.

Much of his work here is just as good as anything he wrote for TV and there’s a huge variety in the types of stories too. A couple of them are dark retellings of fairy tales – one where a downed military pilot finds an old structure that brings to mind the people frozen in place in Sleeping Beauty, another takes inspiration from Snow White and sees a bitter older woman convincing a young girl in her care that she is ugly.

You’ve got some classic horror in there too, with a story called Minuke that is essentially about a haunted house. It’s very much the type of story that most horror fans will have consumed before, but not only is it a really good version of it, it’s also a relatively early one too, so it deserves praise and recognition for that.

Others have a kind of dark whimsy to them – specifically a story about a taxidermist who heads to the local pond to capture frogs for his projects (which involve posing them as if they were little people). In the end he meets an hilariously ironic fate. Another one of them deals with a child who appears to befriend a scarecrow, but the scarecrow is alive and quite clearly not a scarecrow, but you don’t really know what is going on as you only see from the child’s perspective.

Some of them are quite rooted in reality too and just deal with human dramas – usually with a fair amount of tension. One is about a man in a chip shop who knows his wife is being unfaithful. Another is about a man doing the best he can to avoid having an emotional response to his mother’s death (and succeeding for the most part). It’s nice to know that each story could be about literally anything. One of the most distressing stories, about rats, is also one that isn’t completely outside of reality.

I’m not sure which my favourite of the bunch was. It might be a story that deals with the end of time itself, but from a very mundane perspective. It was really quite chilling. Though there are lots of great ones – including a sad story from the point of view of a ghost, and a story about a guy who cons a bunch of people to the detriment of us all (a story for our times).

Funnily enough, it was probably Tomato Cain itself which I found the least interesting – which was a loosely comic story about how a man got the nickname “Tomato Cain” but even that was still mildly enjoyable. Nothing in here is bad, but overall it is a fantastic collection of stories that’ll often make you laugh, and consistently make you uneasy.

Rating: 8.7/10

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This is probably the best feminist horror story I have ever read – and I appreciate that that might sound like an unusual genre. There have been so many advancements in mental health during the last couple of decades that it’s easy to forget just how terrible things were in relatively recent history – especially for women. The Yellow Wallpaper illustrates that in a very chilling way.

The whole story is told from the perspective of a woman whose husband and doctor have decided that she needs to start taking things easy. Her own feelings and perspectives are never really listened to or taken seriously, and what should have been something relatively mild, ends up becoming much more serious.

I think it’s a story that’s just as relevant now as it was when it was first published back in 1892. For one thing, it stands as an important historic record of the type of experience many women had at the time (even if this story is entirely fictional). Also, while things are much better these days, women’s health being dismissed and consequently not tended to properly is still an enormous problem today – and a lot of people in my life have first-hand experience of this.

It’s a short piece of work (it only takes about 30 minutes to read it all), but it really highlights the author’s strengths that the story and characters all still managed to have such a big impact on me. Right at the end, it’s not clear exactly what has happened, and I know that some people have a supernatural interpretation of it. It’s a good story to discuss with people for that reason, and while I am not sure if I subscribe to the supernatural reading, even if you do, I don’t think it makes the story any less serious or weakens its commentary on society.

What I found particularly upsetting was how the narrator’s mental decline is very apparent as the story goes on. At the start, she’s perfectly lucid, but by the end her grip in reality is very loose – and the saddest thing of all is that the people who are supposed to be in a position to help her are actually the ones who are making her worse. It’s the hopelessness of it all that makes it so heart-breaking.

I don’t want to say too much more, because it’s only a short piece and I don’t want to give too much away, but I definitely recommend it to just about anyone. There’s very little to lose by sparing half an hour to read it, but there is an awful lot to gain. It’s an important slice of feminist literary history.

Rating: 8.8/10

Buy it here.

This is the second novel in the beloved Goosebumps series. I have to say that, though I enjoyed this one, I felt it was a bit weaker than the first one (Welcome to Dead House). I obviously don’t expect children’s horror novels to have super deep literary or gothic storylines, but where the first one kept me guessing and had some pretty shocking twists and developments, this one had a much more basic plot and wasn’t as creepy as the first.

The storyline features two kids, a brother and a sister, who are concerned about their father growing increasingly distant and spending more and more time working on an experiment in the basement of their home. Things grow worse when their mother has to go away for a while, leaving them alone with their aloof father. Naturally, they end up going into the cellar to see what he’s up to… despite him expressly forbidding them to go in there.

I won’t spoil what’s actually going on down there, but it wasn’t really something that pushed my spooky buttons. I wasn’t bored at any point, and the novel is far too short to overstay its welcome, but it felt like more of a mild sci-fi thriller than anything truly disturbing – which is a shame because I felt Welcome to Dead House really was kind of unsettling.

I think for me, the stakes felt lower because the children were within their own home the whole time, and they were mostly investigating something their own father was doing. Perhaps that would make it more unsettling for some people, but I felt that that made everything feel a lot safer than in the first book, which had the whole family moved into a new and unknown environment.

Still, it was enjoyable enough while it lasted and there were a few scenes that were kind of unnerving in a gross-out kind of way. I highly doubt anyone would regret reading it, and it’s a good light read for anyone after a pallet cleanser after something heavier.

Rating: 7/10

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This was Charles Dickens first ever novel and one that I was inspired to read because I come from Corsham. Among people of Corsham, there’s a lot of talk about how this book was partially written while Charles Dickens was in the town and how it was partially inspired by it. While this may be true, anybody reading it in the hopes of seeing a fictional representation of Corsham will be disappointed as it does not feature at all – though it does include chapters set in Bath, Bristol, and Ipswich, which are all other towns that I know well.

This is one of those old novels that you can tell was written for serialisation. The storyline essentially just follows the Pickwick Club (a group of eccentric, bumbling rich men) who travel around the country looking to meet new people and have new experiences. In that sense, it’s really just a random string of events which have been strung together – they range from comedic escapades, to really bleak anecdotes relayed by side characters. One chapter might be a man having a silly conversation with a ghost that lives in a chair, another chapter might be about a man’s slow descent into insanity as he keeps thinking he is going to murder his wife.

The overall effect of this is that some chapters are really, really good, while others are pretty dull and you never know what you’re going to get. I did find the Pickwick Club members themselves quite endearing, especially Mr. Pickwick himself, and the scrapes and misunderstandings they get themselves into were usually pretty funny. Though sometimes the story focused on romance plots which didn’t seem quite as compelling, as well as long court cases which I wish could have been wrapped up sooner.

It’s a really unique reading experience, and not strictly in a good way. I am glad that I read it, and things like someone asking a ghost “Why do you continue to stay in the room you died when you could go out and see the whole world?” really amused me. It’s disappointing that it didn’t really seem to tackle social injustices in the same way that some of his later work does, and I wouldn’t recommend this to modern readers who haven’t tried other Dickens novels, but if you’ve read a lot of other classics, including some of his other works, I think you might enjoy it.

Rating: 6.3/10

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Volume 16 of Assassination Classroom was absolutely incredible and offered an insight into Koro-sensei’s past. It was that origin story that really elevated the character to one of my favourite fictional creations of all time. Volume 17, in contrast, is much more humdrum, which is probably to be expected (not every volume can be incredible), but it is, at least, still very enjoyable.

Essentially, the story this time is that the students are fighting amongst themselves in order to decide whether they should continue to try to assassinate Koro-sensei, or if it might be better for them to try and find a way to save him from his Earth-threatening condition. It’s not just chaotic conflict between them either, but a carefully organised fight, with Karasuma and Koro-sensei watching and judging it closely.

In some ways it’s a bit of a generic Shonen “let’s get everyone fighting each other” affair (so it’s fortunate that I like the characters), but it does go a little bit deeper than that. This volume also explores the history of the friendship between Nagisa and Karma, which I found interesting and is an important milestone in the relationship between the two of them, since they are both on opposing sides of the fight. This is what kept this volume interesting for me.

Other than the two teams fighting and the deeper insight into Karma and Nagisa’s friendship, there’s really not much else going on here. To be honest, it’s a little bit of a filler volume, but nonetheless, I’m deeply enough invested by this point that even the filler keeps me hooked. Though to be honest, if I imagined somebody skipping this volume, they’d probably figure out what happened and carry on easily enough without it (even if they did miss some backstory).

Rating: 8/10

Buy it here.