Book Review: The Epictetus Club

Review By Casey Douglass

If you are interested in Stoic philosophy, and if you are anything like me, you might enjoy books or other media that give examples of said philosophy being applied by someone to improve their life. Jeff Traylor’s The Epictetus Club is one such book, and it tells of the ways in which a group of inmates at the Ohio Penitentiary attempt to live the philosophy of the Stoics.


Jeff’s introduction reveals that The Epictetus Club is very much inspired by real events, places and people, but that locations may have been changed and fictional composites used for some of the characters to help craft the story. Jeff explains that he taught a course about cognitive skills in a community-based correctional facility, and that he hoped that this book might provide a valuable aide memoire for the men he’d been teaching.


Jeff soon realised that the book could help other souls in various parts of the correctional system who might not have access to classes such as the one that he taught. He also points out that the book provides some ideas and a great analogy for people who aren’t currently living in the prison system, as the four walls of a prison align well with the mental walls that box in our thinking.


The main inmate character is Zeno, a lifer who happens to find a copy of Epictetus’s book The Enchiridion under the mattress in his new cell. This is a pleasing nod to the oft quoted origin of Stoicism, where Zeno of Citium is said to have suffered a shipwreck which sets him on the path to creating Stoicism. However, whereas the Zeno of the ancient world was a rich merchant, the Zeno of The Epictetus Club is a former professional boxer.


The Epictetus Club itself is run by Zeno under the supervision of a suitable staff advisor, which becomes Jeff once the previous advisor takes a new job elsewhere. The club meets once per week and allows inmates to learn about how their own thoughts trip them up in life. This is achieved with a number of boxing skill comparisons and much discussion about how to apply reason in situations from the inmates’ lives.


There is a lot to like about The Epictetus Club. I like the way that it distils some Stoic philosophical principles down to understandable conversations that aren’t complicated by obscure terms. There are also some exercises and approaches that don’t seem to be from Stoic philosophy too, but they do gel quite nicely with the more obvious Stoic ideas. The book touches on a decent amount of classical Stoic concepts, such as what is and isn’t in our control, living in accordance with universal and personal nature, playing your role in life, analysing your representations to see if they are true, and how our value judgments can cause us all sorts of problems.


There were a couple of things that I didn’t like quite so much, but they were more down to my own personal taste than anything. One is that, even though I appreciate the setting and how the inmates were being reached, the boxing metaphor doesn’t sit that well with me. Decades of struggling with OCD have shown me time and again that being adversarial with your thoughts isn’t the best approach to peace of mind. Then again, there are examples in the original Stoic texts that use training and sports as metaphors so it is actually quite fitting.


The other thing is that, even though it’s always nice to see examples of people adopting new ideas and using them to improve their lives, it can be a little deceptive how easily some people seem to take to these ideas. I guess what I mean to say is that there seems to be very little struggle with this for some of the characters in this book.


An example is when Jeff reads something from The Enchiridion when he was potentially at risk in a scary situation. It put his mind at ease and he felt much calmer, which is wonderful, but also seems a little too perfect. My own experience with Stoicism is that it takes much awareness and contemplation to adopt the concepts into your outlook on life, even if initially you intellectually accept and agree with them. Once strong emotions (or passions) arise in you in a situation, it’s amazing how quickly this new way of thinking can evaporate.


The Epictetus Club is a great accessible glimpse into how Stoic philosophy has been used to help inmates come out of prison in a better state than the one they were in when they entered. It introduces the reader to a number of Epictetus’ teachings, and weaves them into real-life problems and situations that, while likely different to what the reader is experiencing in some ways, will share some common elements that might just make a mental lightbulb flare in recognition. It may even kindle a desire to learn more about Stoic philosophy in the future.


Book Title: The Epictetus Club

Book Author: Jeff Traylor & Inmate Zeno

Publisher: Papillon Press. Reprinted by Drinian Press.

Published: August 2004

ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0941467094

Price: Currently between £10-£20 depending where you can find it

Book Review: Is Fred in the Refrigerator?: Taming OCD and Reclaiming My Life

Review by Casey Douglass

When I scroll down my word-processing document, the one in which I’m writing this review, the application hangs as I get to the part where I copy-pasted some details about Is Fred in the Refrigerator?: Taming OCD and Reclaiming My Life. It most often does this when I’ve accidentally pasted something that is trying to access the internet, usually an embedded picture. In this instance, all that I can see is stuff from the Amazon store page, the ISBN number, prices, and the blurb. No pictures. Is there a hidden element that the removing of all formatting didn’t reveal? Should I close and reopen the document? No, because this is exactly what feeds my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), this need to strive for the certainty that things are “okay”. Instead, it just gave me a pretty great introduction paragraph for my review of a book about someone who knows the struggle of OCD all too well.

Shala Nicely is a counsellor and therapist who specializes in the treatment of OCD. Shala is well acquainted with the twisted ways in which OCD can warp someone’s life, as it has been her companion for nearly all of hers. From a very young age, after a particularly trying and nasty accident, a young Shala started experiencing intrusive thoughts and images that depicted her parents being decapitated by a guillotine. She worried that these thoughts meant something was wrong with her, that she was a bad person for having them, that she needed to “make them right”. Whenever the intrusive thought occurred, young Shala forced herself to replay the mental grisly scene again, but this time, she had to change what happened, saving her parents and protecting them in the arena of her mind. This had to be done every night. Over time, Shala felt that she had to pray to “tame the ever-morphing monster in my head”. This saw her attempts to fend off the upsetting images evolve into praying to God in a very particular way. The words and names had to be said in the correct order, and they had to “feel right”. If things didn’t feel right, she repeated the prayer until it did, which often involved landing in repetitions that ended in multiples of four, sometimes saying them as much as sixteen times before things felt okay.

Everyone has strange, violent, or sickening, scary thoughts. Everyone. Our brains are like pop-corn makers where every now and then, a piece of corn pops so high that it escapes and bounces onto the floor. When it was amongst all the others, it was unremarkable. Now, that piece grabs our attention, and if you have OCD or are just in a stressed, tired and depleted state, you begin to worry about it, which increases the likelihood that you’d react in the same way if it happens again. We become concerned, afraid, obsessed... and whatever uncertainty resides in the situation fuels it and raises the stakes even more. We might find an action to take that reduces the uncertainty, such as checking, reassurance seeking or something else, and when you’ve carried that action out, you may even feel some relief. Sadly, this is the compulsion part of OCD, and just reinforces the whole cycle of struggling. I fell into this cycle when I was ten years old, and had the (dis)pleasure of my OCD changing theme and morphing many times over the years. I know now that the theme isn’t important however, it’s just the gremlin that is OCD, attacking the things that I care about most.

I deliberately called OCD a gremlin, as that is one of the things Shala does so well in the book: she personifies her OCD. Initially, it is a monster whose name she doesn’t know. As she learns more about it, particularly when she starts to receive effective therapy, she gives her OCD form, seeing it as acting like a small child having a tantrum. When her OCD wasn’t worried, she “imagined it to be quietly knitting, miniature needles clicking away.” When it was acting up, she envisioned it as “a pathetic little creature waddling along behind me, whining about all the things that would kill us, dragging the tissue it used to wipe its runny nose.” This also leads to some funny moments, particularly when she is doing Exposure and Response therapy to expose to her anxiety. In one instance, she separated a sandwich into its individual components and laid them on the bathroom floor of her hotel room. She then remade the sandwich and ate it, causing her to be at a solid 10/10 in anxiety, but also so happy that she’d stood her ground: “I also felt joyous, as my OCD stood up and staggered, its eyes rolling into the back of its head, and passed out on the floor.”

Shala writes so very well, using different flashbacks and events to set the scene, describing the environment in a vivid way (OCD sufferers are Olympic level “noticers” after all) and never flinching from revealing things that would be hard for anyone to reveal. The honesty Shala embraced, for a therapist to reveal the new ways that her OCD infiltrated her own life while she was treating others, is amazing. She didn’t bow down to her OCD’s dire warnings of “People won’t want to be treated by you when they find out what you’re really like!” or the discomfort of carrying on anyway. I can’t speak for anyone else but I’d happily have Shala as my therapist! It’s just classic OCD, the way that it focusses on things that are important to you or that you are most afraid of. If you had a pencil that meant the world to you, and you also had OCD, your mind would find a way to worry about that pencil, about what might happen to it, how you’d cope if it was lost, stolen or broken, and what it means about you that you are so concerned. That’s how OCD operates. The ultimate propagandist. On the other hand, I can fully imagine someone with a the fear of winning the lottery. Maybe they heard about it rarely making people happy and decided they were happy enough as it is? Who knows! So they don’t buy a ticket. But then their mind says “What if you bought a ticket and didn’t realise it, and you’ve won, and there's a knock on the door one day by someone bearing an oversized cheque?” Now they feel that they have to start checking their pockets to be certain that they didn’t buy one. Then their mind says “What if someone buys you a ticket as a present? You’d better tell everyone you don’t want that... but don’t be too obvious about it, you don’t want them to think you’re weird!”... and down and down into the OCD spiral they go.

This isn’t a self-help treatment book, although Shala has co-written one of those too called: Everyday Mindfulness for OCD: Tips, Tricks & Skills for Living Joyfully, but a book in which you can see someone’s struggles laid bare. You can read about how Shala journeyed through the fear of wondering what was happening to her, the many failed attempts to deal with things and find the appropriate therapy. You’ll also see the friends and the other people that she talked to, and how she found a way to navigate her life and to bring what she’s learned to people who are also struggling. I read Is Fred in the Refrigerator? while in a severe period during which my own OCD was getting me down and for me, it was the ideal kind of book for that situation. As seems quite typical for a self-pressuring anxious person, I’ve read most of the “go to” books that get mentioned when it comes to OCD: Brain Lock, The Imp of The Mind, books about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, CBT, and Exposure and Response Prevention etc. Sometimes however, you just need to see someone else going through the same stuff and coming out on the other side, even if the other side is still often a struggle.

If you struggle with OCD to any degree, I think you’ll find some welcome comfort and companionship in Shala’s book. If you have never felt the touch of OCD and would like to understand it more, in a quite visceral way, I think that this is also the book for you.

Visit Shala at her website and check out Is Fred in the Refrigerator? at this link.

Book Title: Is Fred in the Refrigerator?: Taming OCD and Reclaiming My Life

Book Author: Shala Nicely

Publisher: Nicely Done, LLC

Released: May 2018

ISBN: 978-1732177000

Current Price: $14.55 / £11.82 (Paperback). $9.40 / £7.17 (Kindle).

Book Review: "You're Crazy" Volume Two - First-Hand Accounts of Surviving Trauma, Addiction & Mental Health from within the Punk Rock Scene

Review By Casey Douglass

To someone who hasn’t been through it, the notion of “getting help” when you are struggling with life, is often floated in much the same way as getting your car fixed, or cleaning out the closet. Just do it and you’ll be okay. The people who think that getting help is all that you need to do tend to emerge on social media when certain awareness days roll around, signalling their “virtue” and “compassion” by displaying their paper-thin understanding. Yuck. “You're Crazy" Volume Two - First-Hand Accounts of Surviving Trauma, Addiction & Mental Health from within the Punk Rock Scene is a collection of experiences from people who have been through some heavy shit, whose understanding is cement-thick, and who candidly open up about their attempts to get help, to live each day, and to find a reason to keep on living.

"You're Crazy" Volume Two is edited by Craig Lewis, who is also no stranger to how fucked up things can get. In his introduction, he recounts some of his own story, about how he was falsely diagnosed and medicalized, and how he had to fight to see through the gaslighting that he’d been subjected to. People tend to have a lofty view of the medical system, how wonderful it is and how saintly the people who work inside it are. Sure, some wonderful people DO work in the medical field and in other support authorities, but like any profession, there are also lots of arseholes too. When something has failed to help you in the way that most sensible people would think that it should, “get help” soon becomes another stick that an overwhelmed mind beats itself with. Sometimes there is just nowhere to turn to get that help, so you have to make do with what is at hand.

When life feels unbearable, it’s little wonder that people will do almost anything to ease their pain, whatever the original trauma, event or trigger. Drinking until you can forget, taking drugs, self-harm, relentless self-hatred, fantasizing about suicide and maybe even attempting it, all become outlets for releasing the pressure and numbing the pain. Some people in this book managed to get some kind of outside help, others were let down or weren’t in a position to even seek it. Many of the experiences in this book tell of people who’ve lost their hope, their dreams and their enjoyments, besides their numbing substance or behaviour of choice. That is, except for punk music. A common thread between the contributors is how the punk attitude and the punk scene itself, offered their lives something that they just hadn’t found elsewhere. Acceptance, non-judgement, a way to vent through their love of the music. It’s hard not to view it as a double-edged sword however, as certain elements of the scene amplified and eased some of the writers’ access to the substances and behaviours that continued to drag them down.

“Punk rock saved my life. I surely would have killed myself if I hadn’t found this music and lifestyle,” is a quote from near the end of the very first contribution, written by Christoffer. It’s also a sentiment that appears again and again as you read the others contained in the book. However dark the tale and however much the writer is still suffering to this day, the punk scene and its music is credited again and again for having an overall positive effect on the listener’s life. While I myself am not really into punk, I know that a lot of the vibe spills over into the heavy metal that I enjoy. I also can empathise with the feeling of “finding your thing” as I feel much the same way about dark ambient music and the way that it tends to envelop my mind when I need it to. When life seems hard to bear, which is most days, having that outlet is priceless.

“You're Crazy" Volume Two - First-Hand Accounts of Surviving Trauma, Addiction & Mental Health from within the Punk Rock Scene is not an easy read, as you might imagine, but it’s a worthwhile one. If you’ve struggled with mental health, trauma or addiction, you will find some kindred souls here, and if you’re a punk lover, you’ll especially appreciate the playlist tips and stories of how certain bands transformed someone’s life. If you don’t really fall into either of these camps but are open to reading a book of experiences that is raw and unsanitized, you should also check it out. There is also some really cool artwork to enjoy at the end of each chapter.

I was given access to a review copy of this book.

Book Title: "You're Crazy" Volume Two - First-Hand Accounts of Surviving Trauma, Addiction & Mental Health from within the Punk Rock Scene

Editor: Craig Lewis

Publisher: Better Days Recovery Press

ISBN: 9781716249372

Price: $16.89 / £15.99 (paperback)

Book Review: The Craig Lewis Guide to Surviving the Impossible

Review by Casey Douglass

The difference between being alive and actually living can sometimes seem as vast as the cosmos. When another day dawns and you’re instantly swamped with feelings of overwhelm, illness and despair, it can be easy to forget how living compares to simply existing. Craig Lewis knows this feeling all too well, and in his book The Craig Lewis Guide to Surviving the Impossible he uses poetry, rousing words and to-the-point worksheet questions to help the reader gain some insight into their own possible way forward.

Early in his life, Craig had horrendous experiences with the mental healthcare system, being misdiagnosed, mistreated, and failed by the people who should have cared about him the most, or at the least, others who should have noticed what was going on and stepped in to help. Craig has had a lot of clawing back to do, to regather himself and the things that he cares about in his life. He is honest enough to admit that he still struggles frequently, but it seems that he is in a far better place now than even a few years ago, which is good to see.

The first few pages of The Craig Lewis Guide to Surviving the Impossible feature introductions by people who know Craig in some way, people who paint a picture of how helpful they find his words with their own troubles, and also of the kind of person Craig is. When we get to Craig’s own introduction, he reveals the reasons that he wrote the book: to help his own healing and to also help others. From this point forward, the book alternates between a poem or small essay on a particular topic, followed by worksheets consisting of a handful of relevant questions that the reader can ask themselves.

I think this mixture of emotive writing followed by questions is a fantastic way to engage the reader. Sometimes, being in the head-space or emotion of a particular issue doesn’t come easily, and sometimes, if you aren’t ‘in it,’ you can’t question it or learn about it, in my experience at least. Whether poem or brief essay, Craig’s words set the scene for the questions to come, the mental equivalent of keying a wall so that a new layer of plaster has something to stick on to. Words reflecting on what it means when someone tells you to “love yourself more” followed by questions about how that makes you feel and what you want to do about it seems a very apt way to approach things.

Even if you can’t answer the questions asked, whether you just don’t know how you feel, or you sense some kind of inner resistance, that can be instructive in and of itself. The “love yourself” concept was one that I personally didn’t really have an answer for, just a nebulous host of feelings that ranged from numbness, to annoyance, to the envying of anyone who can actually “achieve” this feat of self-love. Yet it has stayed in my mind as something to ponder, and I suspect that there is value in that too. This isn’t a comfortable, all-encompassing book that will lead you by the hand or couch its words as it tries to help you. It’s possible that you won’t like your answers to the questions and that you won’t really know to do with that, which is something to keep in mind. They are often simple questions but they might have complicated answers, depending on who is reading them.

The Craig Lewis Guide to Surviving the Impossible is a 50 page book that expresses Craig’s rebellious spirit, and also his drive for his experiences to possibly help others, whether by showing them how he channelled his wounds into creative expression, or by giving the reader self-reflective prompts that might help them to find their own way through their circumstances. I read this book at a time in which I find myself struggling in a variety of ways. I’m still struggling, but I appreciate Craig’s words and his candour in expressing his struggles and there is value in seeing how someone else views some of the important issues in their own recovery. It’s food for thought and a bit of fiery motivation to think along lines that might not have occurred to you. It is the spiky, raw flowing of Craig’s fight back, which is something that I’m sure he’d like you to join him with.

I was given access to a review copy of this book.

Book Title: The Craig Lewis Guide to Surviving the Impossible

Book Author: Craig Lewis

Publisher: Better Days Recovery Press

Released: March 2021

ISBN: 9781716778735

RRP: $12.99 / £13.39 (Paperback)

Book Review: The Stoic Challenge

Review By Casey Douglass

Sometimes, it can feel like life is full of setbacks. Whatever you try to do, things just seem stacked against you. It’s overwhelming. If like me, you have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), you can probably multiply that feeling by a thousand or so. Then add one to the result for good measure. One of the elements of Stoic philosophy that most appeals to me is the notion of the Stoic Test, and William B. Irvine’s book The Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher's Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer, and More Resilient is firmly focussed on that particular approach.

Stoicism, as a philosophy, doesn’t entail suppressing emotions and keeping a stiff upper lip. That’s small “s” stoicism. Stoicism, the philosophy, takes a number of approaches in helping the practiser enjoy life just as it is. It does this by encouraging us to reflect on the things that are in, and beyond, our control, and living a life driven by values that aid us rather than harm us. Stoics still feel emotion, but they don’t needlessly fuel it by rumination. The practices they engage in also reduce the chance of negative emotion occurring.

William illustrates this nicely in the book with a burst water pipe analogy. The burst pipe, the setback, needs to be solved. The water that floods your house is your emotional reaction. Some water will leak, even if you are a super plumber who always has your tools at hand. Regardless, the sooner you can fix the pipe or stop the flow, the less damage the water will do to your home. If someone triggers anger in you (the burst pipe), you can either notice it and rise to the challenge, or you can lose your temper with them, stew all day, and flood your emotional basement. Using the Stoic Test approach is one way of dealing with this.

William explains that the Stoics purposefully adjusted how they framed events, to help bring their actions more into alignment with the virtues that they wanted to live by. An example of a re-framing that I always think of is that the sensations of anxiety and excitement are very similar, and how we view a particular arising depends on which frame we view said sensations through. That doesn’t mean in the midst of an OCD spiral, that I can suddenly decide to view it as exciting, but I get the concept if nothing else. Making use of the Stoic Test approach, for me, is more a reminder to at least recognise that things can be viewed differently.

To practise the Stoic Test frame, when you are confronted by a setback, you decide to frame it by saying that the Stoic Gods are sending you this challenge, for your own good, as a way to develop and grow. Now, you don’t need to believe that these Gods exist. You can even just imagine a sage-like elder standing nearby and prodding you towards the challenge. William emphasises that you need to bring this to mind as quickly as possible, preferably within five seconds of the first flush of frustration, anger or whatever is occurring, as it can stop the emotions running away with you. That’s about it. There are nuances and other helpful elements that William covers in the book, but that's the broad gist of things.

When I first started applying the Stoic Test frame to the setbacks I experienced, I was often slow in remembering to do so. I’d get a minute or two into some response and then remember it. Over time though, the notion came to mind more quickly. When it did, it genuinely seemed to help with how I viewed things. When I was able to apply it, it made setbacks seem almost amusing, or at the least, it felt fun to approach them as a challenge. I couldn’t do this all of the time, but it is slowly creeping into my world view the more that I do it. Things that trigger strong emotions are harder for me than more trifling setbacks, but as with anything, as the test frame becomes habitual, I don’t see why I couldn’t make headway with those too.

I had a nice example of a minor setback just before I started to redraft this review. I received an email coupon from a gaming website offering a discount. Often the coupons can’t be used if you’ve been a member before, but this one was titled in such a way that it suggested I could use it. What’s more, a game I have been interested in for awhile is included, so I was pleased at the idea of treating myself to a very cheap game. Well, the coupon couldn’t be used. It was the same as similar ones I’d been sent before after all, just titled in a misleading way. Within a few moments I reframed it as a Stoic Test and smiled. I did have a brief moment of wanting to tweet at the company to let them know that their coupon was misleading, but that urge soon fell away. Who cares. What’s more, the next day the company emailed and said that things didn’t quite go to plan, but now the coupon works as it should. It’s a low grade, low stakes example of how framing something differently takes some of the sting out of things. I wasn’t super upset, just mildly irked and disappointed. The fact that things resolved the next day in a favourable way was a pleasant surprise too, but if that hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have minded.

With my OCD, I’m always careful not to buy into approaches that entail trying to control my emotions. This is counterproductive and just makes things worse. I like the Stoic Test frame approach as changing the frame just seems to encourage a softer, more accepting approach to things, without the emotional escalation that we often add to events ourselves. As the fear of setbacks in life, both large and small, is a major element of OCD, anything that can help me to view the world in a more tranquil and accepting way is just fine by me. If you have OCD, you might find the concept helpful to look into, but here, I can only speak as to how it has affected me.

The Stoic Challenge is a fine book that teaches the reader in a warm, friendly way. William illustrates his teachings with a variety of personal examples, and his easy going manner and acknowledgement that he still slips up, all make it a fantastic book. If you have any interest in Stoicism, or in how the way we view life can affect our mental health, I recommend this book. Also, if you have OCD and have yet to get any formal treatment, I’d do that first. I came to Stoicism after having CBT and other therapy, and I wouldn’t change that sequence of events for anything.

Book Title: The Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher's Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer, and More Resilient

Book Author: William B. Irvine

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Current Price: £15.68 Hardback / £10.75 Paperback / £8.96 Kindle

ISBN: 978-0393652499

Published: 1 Oct 2019

Book Review: The Mind Workout

Review By Casey Douglass

My Obsessive Compulsive Disorder really came to a head when I was about ten years old. Thirty years later, it’s still my constant companion. Like most people tend to do, I’ve tried all manner of approaches to deal with it, from perspectives that tackle it head on, such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) to others that try to lessen the symptoms in various ways. Mark Freeman’s The Mind Workout: Twenty steps to improve your mental health and take charge of your life combines a variety of approaches to improve the reader’s mental health. None were wholly new to me, but Mark’s way of knitting them together seemed to come at just the right time.

A month before I purchased Mark’s book, I picked up Jonas Salzgeber’s The Little Book of Stoicism. It must be about the fifth book I’ve read on Stoicism, a philosophy that I find compelling in many ways. The aspect that really sank into my mind on reading this particular book, was the concept of treating everything that happens each day as training. The idea behind this is that it lowers the stakes of things, making them easier to accept and to deal with. Pretty much the opposite to how OCD feels, treating so many things as life and death. That really resonated with me at that moment, even though it’s something I already “knew”. I recommend The Little Book of Stoicism.

Okay, you’re probably wondering why the second paragraph of this review talks about a wholly different book to the one mentioned in the first. Am I some kind of maverick reviewer who likes wasting your time? Not at all. I mention the “everything is training” idea, as it was shortly after I read that book that I discovered Mark’s The Mind Workout. The Stoic training idea so neatly went hand in hand with what Mark writes and teaches, it was a pleasing coincidence. Here were two books telling me the same thing in slightly different ways, one in Stoic terms, the other written by someone who used to be bedevilled by his OCD too! Many years ago, I came across Mark’s Acceptance Field Guide, so his writing wasn’t unknown to me. The Mind Workout expands on the topics he raises in that book wonderfully.

One of the core elements of The Mind Workout is revealed in the very first line of the introduction: “If you don’t run, it’s not weird if you can’t run”. I also enjoy a later quote: “If you avoid sweating, eventually everything makes you sweat. If you avoid anxiety, eventually everything makes you anxious.” One of the ways that Mark teaches the reader about mental health is to draw comparisons with how we build physical fitness and strength. We wouldn’t expect to be able to walk into a gym and pick up the heaviest weights from day one. He points out that, when it comes to our mental health, we need to have this kind of mindset too. He cements this idea by pointing out that how we use our minds during the day, the normal, “inconsequential” things that we do, all build up to get us into the mental difficulties that we might struggle with down the line.

One of the first exercises Mark gives the reader is to practise not checking their smartphone. Now this is by comparison to other things, a low stakes, low grade checking behaviour. Sure, urges are involved, habit, and uncertainty, but unless you are waiting for a ransom call linked to the kidnap of a loved one, it’s not likely to be fraught with super-strong emotions. Mark teaches that how we deal with uncertainty is the key to so much of our problem, and that by dealing with tiny uncertainties well, we can train our brain so that it might handle larger uncertainties more skilfully. Even not checking your phone when the urge arises begins this training, and after all, if you can’t handle the uncertainty of what you might be missing with a phone check, how are you going to live with some of the really “charged” uncertainties that life inevitably throws your way? This is us picking up the small weights at the gym, to start our journey towards those bigger ones at the edge of our vision.

I’ve known for a long time that once I give into an obsession and do some kind of controlling behaviour to make the anxiety go away, I’d be beset by further obsessions later. These might be related to the initial fear, or even in some wholly unrelated area, but it would still be like poking a hole in your tent in the rain, it just lets more misery through. What I didn’t do though, was to look at how the most mundane, boring actions of my day, all contributed to how I got to my current state of tizzy. Another of Mark’s exercises is something he calls “Taking a Compulsion Journey”. You sit with a bit of paper, draw a sweeping line, and write the compulsion you are struggling with at the far end. This might be endlessly scrolling down social media, wanting to keep checking the door is locked, that kind of thing. You then work your way backwards from performing the compulsion, writing down the events of the day, how you felt about them at the time, working backwards in time, maybe even all the way back to getting up in the morning.

I felt besieged by some mild compulsions one evening. I sat down and completed this exercise to see what might have fuelled my state of mind during the day. Wouldn’t you know it, I found three or four instances earlier in the day that seemed to get me to that point, moments where I checked something boring and unnecessary, moments where I was uncertain about something I’d written... Seeing the compulsion journey laid bare, I could acknowledge that it was little wonder that my mind was giving me new uncertainties to solve and battle with at the end of the day. I really appreciated the view it gave me, and it helped me to see that on the days that I managed to live with the small uncertainties, by evening, I wasn’t so frazzled.

Mark has a whole host of exercises in his book and they are all useful for peeling back the veil of how your mental health works. Another of the key points he makes is the importance of finding out which Values are most important to you and being guided by them in your life. Values are like a constant direction that you decide to move in, like saying that you want to head East with a compass and setting out in that direction. You never reach “East”, you just keep going in that direction. They are not goals, although they can be used to help form healthy, meaningful goals too. One of my guiding Values is Creativity, so I always try to ask myself if a certain action will be aligned with that Value. Mark says that it’s important to move towards the things we want in life, rather than only taking action to simply move away from the unpleasant things we don’t want, such as anxiety. He says that Values help us to deal with the tougher times, because we already know where we want to be heading, and they stop us from sliding back to what we already know, the behaviours that keep us in the cycle of struggling. This is what Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is all about, and even though I’d read a few books on it, once again, Mark’s presentation really helped me.

Wow, this review is getting seriously long! I will round things off by saying that Mark’s honest descriptions of how his own mental health affected him were incredibly relatable. In the chapter Stop Checking, he describes the daily battle he had with leaving his apartment, his fears of carelessly leaving something in a dangerous state that would burn the building down. He describes his stove, the way the knobs could pop off and then you wouldn't know, when you put them on again, if it was actually set to high or low... Even to how, when trying to check if it was off, he would look at the top and assess if he could see the hob was glowing (it was electric). If it wasn’t he’d worry there might be a fault, that it might just be broken, and that something is going badly wrong inside... This goes on for a number of pages, and I felt I could have written something similar about some of the ways my own mind throws up fears, uncertainties, and the things it wants me to do to try to resolve them. You really can start out by worrying that the light is turned off, and end up thinking that you're living in a house that will burn down the moment your back is turned.

The Mind Workout is a book that I highly recommend to anyone suffering with their mental health. It isn’t just aimed at one condition, beyond the human condition and how our brains work that is. Mark also does plenty of videos on YouTube and Twitch streams, where he continues to elaborate and to explain the ways that we can start to head in the direction that we’d most like to in life. It’s also a great chance to see a wall of post-it notes that aren’t being used by an exhausted detective trying to track down a serial killer. I swear that’s how most post-its I see on screen are used these days. Mark’s have interesting mental health tidbits on them. He also loves tea, cookies and doughnuts, which always seems to lighten the tone when they are mentioned.

I’m still struggling, but I feel that more has fallen into place by reading Mark’s book and listening to his online chats. One day at a time...

Book Title: The Mind Workout: Twenty steps to improve your mental health and take charge of your life. (Released as You Are Not A Rock in the U.S/Canada).

Book Author: Mark Freeman

Publisher: Piatkus

Released: June 2017

ISBN: 978-0349414539

RRP: £13.99 Paperback / £5.99 Kindle.

Dark Comic Review: Murky Waters: Tales From Beneath

Review by Casey Douglass

For a long time, I’ve been drawn to media that explores the ways that reality, perception and imagination all interplay in our view of the world. I believe this started for me, when I was in the first throes of undiagnosed Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) as an almost teenager. I think I knew that my mind was taking liberties with the reality it presented to me, but I still fell down the rabbit hole of fear. Murky Waters: Tales From Beneath is a full colour, 56 page collection of eight dark comic book stories. These tales look at some of the ways that our minds play with reality, and reading this about it, was more than enough for it to get my attention.

There are a number of philosophical and unnerving elements on offer in Murky Waters’ pages. These range from the way that others view us and how this might define us, to paranoid notions of being watched or controlled, and ponderings about the nature of what happens to us after death. If that wasn’t enough, there is the way that suffering might affect the mind, questions about imprisonment and entertainment, and the internal pressures to be authentic. A number of these stories manifest in only one or two pages, so as you might expect, the imagery and layout has to do some stellar work in gripping the reader’s mind. I felt that they all achieved this nicely, each in their own way.

Darkness Unending is a prime example of this. It opens with images of a woman’s face, mainly her eyes and nose. She is pondering how different religions view the conundrum of the afterlife. The camera pulls back and we notice blood. We also hear the sounds of combat off to the side. This story felt like an ever expanding frame, with the woman as the focal point and the view pivoting around her. I really liked how almost every cell gives the reader more information and context as to what is happening in the scene, and the climax is certainly a fun one.

Cogito Ergo Sum is another story that I really enjoyed. I loved the colour palette. It made fantastic use of cool sci-fi blues and mellow greens, which is fitting for a sci-fi story set in 2047. A woman hears voices at work and fears she is developing schizophrenia. As with other stories in Murky Waters, nothing is quite as it seems, and it turns out that this woman might actually be right to worry, even if the truth is a little different, and far darker, than the one that she fears.

Above, I said that some of the stories tell their tale in very few pages. Breaking Down The Walls takes just one page to tell its own, a mere six panels. It would be very hard to comment on it without saying too much, but its brevity and fourth wall breaking both go hand in hand to make what I thought was a really impactful moment in time.

The last tale I will mention by name is House of Cracks, mainly because it brings me back to how I opened this review, talking about OCD and how the mind can colour what we see. House of Cracks features a couple trying to overcome loss. The woman initially sees problems with cracks in the wall, and no amount of reassurance sets her mind at ease. She becomes obsessed with other things as the story progresses, all of which seem to be distractions from the couple’s shared emotional suffering, or maybe just manifestations of her own torment. The artwork and colours of this story show how two minds can view the world differently, even through the lens of shared suffering, and again, I found this a very satisfying read.

All of the tales in Murky Waters are dark, thoughtful and clever. The twists and reveals all seemed very satisfying to me, and going back and re-reading each story once I’d got to the end gave me new things to appreciate and to notice. If you like horror, sci-fi and philosophical ideas, all rolled up in striking imagery and intriguing narratives, I think you'll enjoy Murky Waters too.

Murky Waters was created and written by Christian Carnouche, who is also the creator of The Resurrected mini-series. A whole host of international artists (see below) have come together to bring these stories to life, each bringing their own flavour to the images created on the page. A Kickstarter has just begun to try to raise funding for the initial printing run, and this has a whole host of rewards and benefits for the backers. If you like the sound of Murky Waters, head over to the Kickstarter and see if there is a support option that you might want to take advantage of.

I was given access to a review copy of this anthology.

Comic Book Name: Murky Waters: Tales From Beneath

Author: Christian Carnouche

Editor: Erica Schultz

Artists: Gabriela Contreras, Christian DiBari, Alex Diotto, Matthew Dow Smith, Triona Farrell, Ismael Hernandez, Maan House, Allison Hu, Dearbhla Kelly, Ariela Kristantina, Roshan Kurichiyanil, Lala Narita, Devmalya Pramanik and J. Schiek. Donna. Also, A. Black, Iain Laurie and Sachi Ediriweera produced pin-ups for the campaign.

Cover By: Tula Lotay.

Lettered By: Cardinal Rae

Publisher: Carnouche Productions

Kickstarter Link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2129323534/murky-waters-tales-from-beneath

Book Review: Feeling Great

Review Written by Casey Douglass

I was first exposed to cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) when I was getting treatment for a horrific bout of OCD in my teens. During a recent period of depression, I heard about Dr David Burns’ original book: Feeling Good. It was old enough that I worried it might be quite dated, but I bought the workbook based upon it after seeing it recommended in some relatively recent Youtube videos. It was mostly the CBT I’d read and practised, but Dr Burns’ variety of CBT does have a few elements that seem to set it apart from the others. Feeling Great is Dr Burns’ newest book, an update to Feeling Good that injects all he has learned in the many years since his first book was released. I purchased it at release, and here are my thoughts about it.

Feeling Great doesn’t take long to get into the meat of what Dr Burns teaches. It boils down to three things that underpin cognitive therapy: 1. Your thoughts drive how you feel. 2. Your upsetting negative thoughts are nearly always distorted. 3. If you change the way you think, you change the way you feel. Dr Burns then provides his TEAM-CBT framework to help you achieve this change.

A key element in TEAM-CBT is the patient filling out a Daily Mood Journal. This is a form where they record certain details of their feelings and emotions, their thoughts about a particular event, how much they believe them, and a little later, this where they analyse the cognitive distortions present in each thought. Cognitive distortions are ways that we twist our thinking; they make our thoughts appear to be something they really aren't. An example is Magnification, where we blow up the importance or seriousness of something that really doesn’t warrant it. Another is All or Nothing thinking, such as “If I’m not a winner, I’m a loser!”. There is no room for grey areas with that kind of outlook. There are ten common cognitive distortions, and some thoughts may have traces of all of them!

I’ve come across the concept of cognitive distortions before, in countless CBT and OCD related books. I find it very helpful to think about these distortions, and the more of them that I find in a certain thought, the easier it is to feel more certain that it’s a twisted thought. One thing that I don’t remember encountering before though, is positive re-framing. A very important element of Dr Burns’ treatment method is that he asks the patient: “What does having this thought or feeling show that’s really awesome about you?” As an example, most people want to get rid of their anxiety. It feels awful. If you stop and think about it though, feeling anxious about something, maybe an upcoming exam, actually says something about you. For a start, it shows that you care about doing well. This anxiety may have motivated you in the past to achieve things, and it also shows that you have high standards. It’s strange, but sitting and finding the good qualities in something that feels wholly negative, you find yourself in the position of not wanting to get rid of the anxiety in total, but maybe just reducing it so that you don't miss out on the good stuff it provides. In one of Dr Burn’s podcasts, he says something along the lines of “The therapist actually ends up saying to the patient: “If you get all these good things from your anxiety, why would you want to give it up?”. Paradoxically, this seems to lower any resistance to change, and makes the methods Dr Burns teaches even more effective.

Dr Burns gives the reader 50 tools to help them crush their negative thoughts, some of which work better on thoughts with certain distortions than others. The charm of having so many techniques is that it doesn't take long to work your way through some likely ones until you find the one that seems to do the trick. What’s more, Dr Burns often mentions on his podcast something he calls “fractal psychotherapy”. He believes that dealing with one specific moment, and the thoughts related to it, helps us to deal with the repeating cognitive patterns and issues that underlie most of our problems. This often means that “putting the lie” to one negative thought on your Daily Mood Journal often means you can swiftly work your way down the others, once you’ve found that one of the methods begins to shift your thinking. I’ve experienced this myself on countless occasions. Sure, you get some thoughts that might need extra work or multiple sessions, but for the most part, when one domino falls, the others fall quite easily.

I already feel that this review is getting a little too long, so I will briefly touch on other topics Dr Burns writes about in Feeling Great. He describes the 5 Secrets of Effective Communication, and how they can help relationship issues. He spends one section of the book talking about the philosophical idea of the self, if we really have one and the role it plays in feeling worthy or unworthy. He describes relapse prevention techniques for when you trip and stumble, as will inevitably happen with life's ups and downs. Dr Burns often says that “We are entitled to an average of five happy days a week and two lousy days.” I quite like this as it flies against the usual bullshit often seen in the media, that if you aren't happy all of the time, there's something wrong with you. The book also ends with a chapter written by Dr Mark Noble, who looks at the neuroscience behind why TEAM-CBT seems to be so effective.

Feeling Great is a lovely update to Dr Burns’ earlier body of work. It puts all of the newer advice that he so often shares in his podcast, and the things he has learned over the years, into a handy reference book that is written with humour and plenty of examples of real people’s struggles. A few of the tables/charts didn’t display very well on the Kindle edition that I bought, but that’s such a common issue across countless Kindle books I own, I don’t really mind. Using Dr Burns’ techniques helped me to get out of a severe depression a few months before this book released, and while most of the stuff in Feeling Great was already known to me, by way of his Feeling Good Workbook and his podcast, I am still very pleased with having it expanded upon and freshened up in this new book.

Visit Dr Burns at his website for more information and to find your way to his podcast.

Book Title: FeelingGreat - The Revolutionary New Treatment for Depression and Anxiety

Book Author: Dr David Burns MD

Publisher: PESI Publishing & Media

Released: 15 Sept 2020

ISBN: 9781683732884

Current Price: £17.79 (hardcover) / £10.34 (Kindle) (As of Amazon UK on 1^st Oct 2020)

Book Review: Travels with Epicurus

Book Review: Travels with Epicurus

Review by Casey Douglass

The dentist isn’t usually the place for moments of existential clarity. Sure, it might be the altar on which you confess your chocolate loving, sugar-drink binging tendencies, but usually, you are wholly focussed on the pain, or the prospect of it. For Daniel Klein however, a trip to the dentist set his mind turning, and led to the writing of his book: Travels with Epicurus.

The dentist’s verdict was that he’d need some lower teeth removed, and that he could either opt for dentures, or a year of painful procedures to provide him with implants. His dental problems were related to the normal course of ageing, but the two paths he could go down proved revealing about his feelings towards ageing. Did he want an “old man’s smile” or some implants that would allow him to feel more youthful? He was in his early 70s at this point. He realised that he had been caught up in the current trend of “trying to extend the prime of life well into the years that used to be called old age.” Daniel ponders that he is not entirely sure what authentic old age is, or how it might best be lived. He travels to the Greek island of Hydra with a suitcase full of his philosophy books, looking for the answers, from without and within.

The only Hydra I’d ever heard of before reading this book was the mythical creature, or maybe the shadowy crime organisation in a spy novel. Daniel describes the charms of the Greek island and it seems like a great place to contemplate your navel. There are elderly residents that Daniel can appreciate and befriend, and also a different way of life to the hubbub of more metropolitan areas. Time it seems, is perceived differently there, highlighted later in the book in a revealing conversation Daniel has about kombolói, the “worry bead” kind of thing that Greeks use to space out time.

Daniel begins the book proper with an introduction to Epicurus and his philosophy of fulfilment. It doesn't take long for him to dispel the false impression that many people have of Epicurus, which is one of seeking extreme sensual pleasures. Yes, Epicurus counselled people that to have a happy life, they should fill it with pleasure, but there is more nuance to it than that. Not all pleasures are created equal. Some are genuine pleasures, others lead to more pain and suffering. This is highlighted by the way that Epicurus preferred a bowl of plain boiled lentils to a plate of roasted pheasant. Hardly the actions of the sensation chaser he is often portrayed as. When it comes to ageing, Epicurus thought that old age was the pinnacle of life, that the “old man has docked in the harbour, having safeguarded his true happiness”. As you might expect from the title, Epicurus plays a central role in Daniel’s book.

Daniel applies various philosophies (Epicurus and others) to a variety of topics linked with ageing, from the pleasure of companionship in old age to the issues of boredom, play, and the fear of death. Daniel always does a good job of illustrating his point with an event from his past or a description of something on the island. His dog Snookers also makes an appearance, which is something I enjoyed in another of his books: Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It. This isn’t a dry philosophy book, it’s one in which real-life experience is used to illustrate the wisdom of adopting a particular way of looking at life.

When I purchased Travels with Epicurus, I somehow missed the part that described it as being about old age. While Daniel compares old age to old old age (that period in which you aren’t just old, but in which your body and mind are shutting down), I have a feeling, for various reasons, that I'll not even see these periods of my life. With that in mind, I probably wouldn’t have bought this book had I realised its focus. That being said, it was still very pleasant to read about Daniel’s experiences on Hydra, and how these helped further illustrate the philosophies Daniel was mulling over. There is also wisdom to be gleaned from the topic of how we can live best in the later stages of life, that we can apply to our life, no matter which stage we are in. I also realised that I’d probably like anything philosophical that Daniel Klein writes. If he ever brings out a book called “The Philosophy of the Sewer: Tunnels, Faeces and Rats” I’m sure he’d write it in such a way that it would be interesting.

Book Title: Travels with Epicurus

Book Author: Daniel Klein

Publisher: One World Publications

Released: 1 May 2014

RRP: £7.99

ISBN: 9781780744124

Book Review: Ghost Stories for Starless Nights

Book Review: Ghost Stories for Starless Nights

Review by Casey Douglass

Ghost Stories for Starless Nights is a new horror anthology from DBND Publishing. It features 22 ghostly tales and, upon reaching the final page, you realise how varied and inventive this collection of stories really is. Some are more gory than others, others are simply strange, yet others are humorous and a bit whimsical. You are unlikely to get tired of the ghostly theme either, as the interesting twists adopted by each author always seem to refresh your literary palate ahead of the next tale.

The book begins with a mood-setting poem by Baylee Friday, one that opens the reader up to the idea that hauntings can arise in more than one form. After this tasty appetiser, the stories begin, each throwing up something different to the previous one. There is a haunted mirror, a death-race for bikers, a time and geography-looping brush with a demon, a possessed writer, even some strange cursed windows. I find myself wanting to talk about so many of the stories, but I'll limit myself to the three or four that really stood out for me.

After Life by Clark Boyd is a tale about a rich and spoiled man who finds himself unexpectedly struggling in the after life. The tale has a Beetlejuice-esque feel to things, especially in the way that newly dead people are assigned places to haunt by a kind of afterlife job centre. The humour made me chuckle too. There is a certain exchange between the dead man and his undead job advisor, which sees him consigned to haunting a stall in a mens toilet, giving rise to the line: “It’s kind of hard to scare the shit out of someone when they’re already shitting!”

The Inheritance by Marc Joan follows a guy who has to clear out his departed, reclusive uncle’s old rural cottage. Reading this story actually made me feel a little cold and miserable, as the bleakness of the scenery and the chill of the old cottage is wonderfully described. It also likely helps that it’s based in Norfolk and The Fens, which was a pleasant surprise as it’s rare to come across a story set in a landscape that isn’t too far from me. The uncle’s cottage contains very little, except bizarrely, a digital photo frame that only contains one picture. Spoiler alert: It’s not porn. There is also a creepy scarecrow in the field behind the cottage. Strangeness then transpires...

One of the strangest tales for me was Brown Cat Blues by Vaughan Stanger. It’s a story about someone going away for a long trip and worrying about how their neighbour’s cat very possibly could’ve sneaked inside their home before they closed the door, as is its habit. This creates a ghost-projection of cat anxiety, and it makes this tale feel a little like Casper the Friendly Ghost meets Schrödinger's cat. It’s very well written, and it stands out to me as one of the more curious tales in the book.

I mentioned cursed windows in my summary above so I’d better mention the tale they originate from: Beyond the Glass by Phil Stressman. A couple are in the process of building their new house. One night, the husband arrives home with some strange windows that he found near an abandoned property in the area. The glass is odd, distorted, but they take a liking to the windows and use them as their own. It isn’t until the neighbours find out where the windows came from, and more importantly, the wife realises that the view through them isn’t quite as it should be, that she begins to fear that the windows are cursed.

The final story I want to mention is Dominic by Sam Hicks. It’s set in a student house in London. One day, a strange pinkish plate is discovered, one that keeps being set at an extra place at the table. The women living there joke about it, they start to say that it’s for “Dominic”, and begin coming up with light-hearted conversations about him. Things take a strange turn when these exchanges start to bring up jealousy and rivalry, and events in the house go downhill from there. I really enjoyed the inventiveness of this story, the way a joke evolved into something quite horrible. It was a very satisfying tale.

Ghost Stories for Starless Nights is an easy anthology to read. While some stories are longer than others, it didn’t feel like any of them outstayed their welcome. The change in setting and tone of each story makes it a great book to dip into as well, reading a few tales in a sitting rather than reading it from cover to cover in one or two sessions. There will be stories you like better than others, but for me, there were no bad stories, just ones that I found less interesting than others. I could have written about another four or five stories above, which means at least half the book spoke to me, which is revealing in and of itself. If you fancy reading some inventive, bleak, strange and funny ghost stories, you’d do well to check out Ghost Stories for Starless Nights.

I was given a review copy of this book. Thanks to Promote Horror for arranging it.

Book Title: Ghost Stories for Starless Nights

Book Author: Anthology

Publisher: DBND Publishing

Released: May 2020

ISBN: 979-8636973249

Current Price: $6.13 (Kindle) / $14.99 (Paperback)

Book Review: Blister

Book Review: Blister

Review by Casey Douglass

As humans, we often place a lot of emphasis on what we see. A snap judgement can make all the difference between surviving a terrible attack, or laying in a hospital bed wondering why you didn’t run sooner. We also tend to like stuff that “looks nice”. Jeff Strand’s Blister is a horror novel that plays with the notion of beauty, horror and survival, weaving them together to make the reader question how they might react in a similar situation. I bought it on the Kindle store a short while ago and this is my review.

The story opens with the line: “I’m a liar, but this is the truth.” In my opinion, a great opening line. We find out that the events of Blister happened during the mid 1980's and that Jason Tray, a cartoonist, is the one telling us the tale. In an attempt to scare some kids who are terrorizing his dog, Jason goes a little bit overboard, making great use of a fake chainsaw in the process. The fallout from this is that he has to lay low in a Georgian cabin, waiting for the tension back home to ease.

Jason meets some locals and enjoys a drunken evening playing pool, but this soon leads to his being invited to come and see something interesting. He finds himself peering through the window of a strange house, setting eyes on the deformed Blister for the first time. He’s horrified and what’s worse, she knows he looked inside. The next morning, he feels ashamed and decides to revisit the house to apologise. This is where he gets to know the real Blister, and this sows the seeds of his quiet getaway turning into chaos.

The first thing I really appreciated about Blister was that it revelled in the grey areas of motivation. Jason himself isn’t sure if he is acting out of guilt, pity or self-interest, and I found this to be an excellent way to engage the reader. As I read, I found I was questioning myself on how I might have reacted in certain of the situations that he and Blister found themselves in, with the result quite often being that I’d have run a mile. I found Blister herself to be a great character. She came across as someone both vulnerable and strong at the same time. She wasn’t simply a two-dimensional “freak”, but a rounded human being.

Another big element that I enjoyed was the setting of Blister, especially the “small town mentality” that permeated events. It’s the kind of town where news travels fast, secrets are buried and dealt with on the quiet, and outsiders, while not usually unwelcome, are none the less suspect. This setting also led to one of the best “non-barfights” I think I’ve ever read, one in which both men don’t really want to fight but a bored girlfriend just keeps stirring the tension. This is heightened by Jason’s awareness of what is going on and his bafflement at how ridiculous it all is. It made me chuckle.

The horror, when it comes, lives in the descriptions of what happened to Blister, showing why she is how she is. This echoes through Jason’s own involvement in the story, and leads to some sadistic torture-based scenes that were genuinely uncomfortable. I could feel myself in that situation and it was both horrible and riveting to read in equal measure. If anything, the way the story finishes feels slightly less riveting in comparison, the outcome of events satisfactory, but not really hitting those “oh shit!” feelings achieved by the midpoint. I was happy with the ending though, it made sense and for me, got the right mix of happy and sad.

Going into Blister, I was kind of under the preconceived notion that it would be a “murderous horror-freak” type tale, even though the blurb does hint that it’s not that simple. I wasn’t expecting a more nuanced story or one that would make me think so much, and that was a pleasant surprise. The horror and madness is strong in a number of scenes, but the rest is all about the consequences, so even if you are a bit squeamish, you might still like the story too. I really enjoyed it.

You can find Blister on Amazon and on the Sinister Grin Press website.

Book Title: Blister

Book Author: Jeff Strand

Publisher: Sinister Grin Press

Released: 2016

ISBN: 978-1944044190

Current Price: £2.06 (Kindle)

Book Review: Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It

Book Review: Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It

Review by Casey Douglass

If I hear a tasty quote or a short sentence that strikes a chord with how I’m feeling about life, I’ll nod my head, think about writing it down and then never get around to it. Daniel Klein is someone that did actually take the next step in that process and actually put pen to paper. As a young man, Daniel labelled a notebook “Pithies” and decided to record any philosophical gem that spoke to him. Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It was born when decades later, Daniel rediscovered this old notebook, and decided to study it to see what fresh insights might be gained.

The title: Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It was born from a quote from American philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr, and as you might imagine, the book itself consists of plenty of chapters, each beginning with the quote that inspired that particular chapter. In the prologue, Daniel explains the conundrum of how to best order the Pithies. He didn’t want to just arbitrarily write them chronologically, or try to categorise the pigeonhole spanning themes within. He settled on presenting them in a more natural, whimsical way, letting one idea lead him to another. I enjoyed this approach, as I felt it gave the book a more conversational flow, taking in the natural deviations that a friendly philosophical discussion might contain.

The opening sections of the book start with the topic of hedonism and such figures as Epicurus and Aristippus, but soon makes way for the pessimistic Arthur Schopenhauer and the often quite bleak Existentialists such as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. This is what I referenced above, how talking about hedonism and finding pleasure in life soon diverts to the suffering it contains and notions of pain and suicide. That’s not even getting to the notion of free-will, what is our true-self and the benefits of friendship and humour. This is a book dense with ideas and I’ve only very loosely described the first third of it so far.

Don’t let the denseness put you off however, as Daniel does a fine job of making things interesting. The quote that starts each chapter is like an acorn he puts in your hand, and the humble number of pages that follow in said chapter describe the branch of the “philosophy tree” it came from. Certain of these leaves were also taken from Daniel’s own life, whether relating to what was going on at the time he recorded the Pithy, or his own views now looking back at that time. We also get to hear about his dog Snookers in some of his examples, which is something I think more philosophical discourse should include.

The topics in Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It cover quite a variety of things, and Daniel does a good job of explaining his opinions on these issues. I didn’t find myself disagreeing more than a couple of times. The only thing I felt a shake of my head towards was in the chapter about friendship and relationships. Daniel seemed dismissive of the idea of setting certain boundaries in your relationship with someone; how it goes against intimacy and the like. I can see his point and he made his case with a reasonable example, but I would say that boundaries are an important element of self-care for certain people, especially if you happen to live life as a chronic “people pleaser”.

Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It is a lovely book that provides much food for thought. I’d already read a decent number of the philosophers inside, but I also picked up a few names that I’d like to find out more about. The main discovery for me in this respect is David Pearce, a British philosopher who thinks that we must do whatever is possible to make happiness universal. Incorporated into his ideas are the use of technology, such as nanotechnology and designer drugs and how they might be used to bring this about. As someone who struggles with uncomfortable emotions like fear and anxiety on quite a painful level, this notion of what a world without certain emotions would be like is an interesting thing to ponder. I’ve yet to actually read anything of Pearce’s directly but I firmly intend to.

So for £1.99, I bought a book that took me on a philosophical tour of some of the most enrapturing ideas for the author, with the added bonus of finding some new avenues to follow along the way. I’ve spent more on crisps! If you enjoy philosophy that is presented in a calm, thoughtful way, head on over to Amazon or the publisher’s website to find out more.

Book Title: Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It

Book Author: Daniel Klein

Publisher: Oneworld Publications

Released: 2015

ISBN: 9781780749327

Current Price: £8.19 (Paperback) / £1.99 (Kindle)

Book Review: The Hematophages

Book Review: The Hematophages

Review by Casey Douglass

The other day, I found myself wanting to read some space-based horror, something that might contain blood, ideally in rattling metal corridors and featuring a strange, twisted threat. I browsed through some of the horror presses I follow on Twitter and after a few clicks, Stephen Kozeniewski’s The Hematophages was sitting on my Kindle. The blurb told tale of a strange fleshworld, ghoulish skin-wrappers and depravity, which are three things that I didn’t know I was looking for, but on seeing them, made it an easy purchase.

The story follows Paige Ambroziak, a student who, in the opening pages, is going through a job interview. The job in question is a salvage mission to recover an old seed ship from a bizarre fleshworld, a bounty that various megacorps are salivating about claiming. Paige has spent most of her life on Yloft, a deep space outpost where she moved when she was young. This new job offers the prospect of adventure, fortune and excitement, and on landing it, her fate is sealed. She doesn’t believe this is just any seed ship however, but The Manifest Destiny, a ship that was launched when countries were powers in the world. The Manifest Destiny’s plight is even the subject of a movie that everyone seems to have grown up watching.

Paige’s journey to the fleshworld doesn’t go smoothly. Her new ship, the RV Borgwardt, crosses paths with gruesome pirates called skin-wrappers, a strange group of mummy-like creatures in which illness caused them to flay their flesh and live in zero-gravity. Beyond the threat of pirates, the fleshworld itself holds various dangers, its blood-like protoplasm the home of the Hematophages of the title: the blood drinkers. I enjoyed the fleshworld as a location. There is something quite gruesome about a planet with an ocean of blood, even the thought itself has a very strange weight to it, like dropping a stone down a wishing well and hearing something chilling echo back, rather than a “plop”.

The Hematophages themselves are a fun adversary, if fun is the right word. There is something about them that brings a lovely paranoia to the tale, and what the crew of the RV Borgwardt learn about their true nature evolves them from a simple adversary to one with a pleasing depth. Even though the Hematophages are the titular terror, I found the skin-wrappers just as engrossing. Just to get into the head-space of someone who is suffering from so much pain that they choose the life of a mummy, it’s a thought that makes you shudder.

The universe that The Hematophages plays out in is a bleak, high-tech and greedy one. The corporations rule all and fight amongst themselves. The technology allows for travelling vast distances into the “ink” while also allowing people to inject crank with the press of a button. The characters that populate the story all have their own personality, from Paige’s bunkmate Zanib who forever calls Paige “virgin” (for not having travelled before) to the intimidating Director Diane who seems to cling to protocol even when the shit hasn’t only hit the fan, but is fizzing in the electrical system too. Paige herself is a sometimes likeable, sometimes unlikeable character. She can be a bit of an arsehole but she is also capable of thinking of others. I liked her, and I appreciate the skill in writing a character that contains shades of grey.

I did get a little lost by the thread of the story on one occasion, a confusing encounter in the first half of the book left me wondering who was really dead and who wasn’t. There was a “reveal” involved which made sense, but it felt layered in a way that I still wasn’t sure about the detail of what happened, just the general big picture stuff. It’s the only thing that jumped out at me as something I had issue with, and that very well could have been on me and my concentration at the time. The story as a whole was a fun ride, and the horror elements were particularly eye-watering. If you read the book, you’ll fully understand my use of that phrase.

The Hematophages is a book that takes you on a dark journey through the “ink”. There seems little of beauty in the parts of the universe it touches upon, and what beauty is there, seems fleeting, needy and self-obsessed. There is a great mixture of fleshy horror and human greed, and it all plays out in those thrumming metal corridors that I always find add a lovely sense of claustrophobia to proceedings. The Hematophages was really fun. Enough said.

Book Title: The Hematophages

Book Author: Stephen Kozeniewski

Publisher: Sinister Grin Press

Released: 1 April 2017

Price: £13.13 paperback / £2.32 Kindle (currently)

ISBN: 9781944044558