Shelfies #12: Matt Muir

The End of Alice by A.M. Homes

This novel was perhaps my first experience of the way in which what you are reading can really influence strangers’ opinions of you. I bought this in an airport, aged about 16, before getting on a flight to Rome; during said flight I was sat next to a woman who I realised quite early on was reading over my shoulder. As the book - which is, to be horribly reductive, ‘the book which people who haven’t read Lolita think Lolita is’ - started to get into its stride, and the contents became more violent and mad and explicit, so the woman in the seat next to me started inching away. By the end of the flight she had managed to put a good 6” between us, impressive in economy class. In case she’s reading this, I AM NOT A PERVERT. 

The Dragonlance Chronicles by Margaret Weis and Tracey Hickman

In 2024 it seems fair to say that the geeks have won (whether or not this is a positive thing is worth debating); in 1991, though, the merest hint of ‘liking Dungeons & Dragons’ or ‘wanting to play fantasy videogames’ would lead to rapid social death and some sort of unpleasantly-physical corrective playground punishment. Which is why my love of the Dragonlance Chronicles - tie-in fiction to the D&D rulebook and featuring ALL OF THE TROPES - was something literally none of my friends knew about. I have owned this since I was about 10, read it literally dozens of times, and only recently been brave enough to display it in public. Everything might be going to tits in 2024, but at least you don’t get beaten up at school anymore for secretly wishing you were an archmage.  

Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk

Unlikely as it sounds, this book got me laid once. I was on a plane again, again going to Rome, and the person who ended up squeezing into the window seat next to me was, amazingly, a pretty American woman of roughly my age who pulled from her bag a copy of the exact same book I was holding - Palahniuk’s Haunted. We inevitably got chatting, got the bus into Rome together, I helped her find her aunt at Termini station, arranged to play tourguide for her the next day, kissed on the Gianicolo overlooking the city… basically we had a lovely 36h together and then never saw each other again, which is the sort of perfect, brilliant thing that honestly never, ever happens to me (it certainly has never come close to happening again). Fucked if I can remember the first thing about the book, mind. 

Weathercock by Glen Duncan

To atone for the sin of having run away to another country to marry a foreigner, and then having the temerity to commit the additional sin of ‘divorce’, my mum had to appease my Italian grandfather by sending me to the local Catholic school; I don’t think anyone who hasn’t been educated at least in part by priests and nuns (and this at a state school, mind) can quite comprehend exactly how much you get told at a very young age about how your very thoughts can be enough to condemn you to a lifetime of sulphurous brimstone and how IF YOU TOUCH IT YOU WILL GO TO HELL (it is a lot). This can lead to a lot of Catholics being very, very confused when it comes to the complicated intersection between sex and guilt and pleasure and pain and right and wrong (not me though, honest guv). This book is about all of those things at once, and it is brilliant, and it makes me very sad to know that its author abandoned a lauded career as a literary novelist to write pulpy werewolf fiction when he realised it would sell about 30x the copies. 

Bug Jack Barron by Normal Spinrad

Growing up, whenever I went to visit my Dad I was always drawn to the massive bookcase at the top of his house where he kept all his old pulp scifi novels - in part, the draw was the cover art, which, given the majority of his collection was from the 60s and 70s and majored heavily in Aldiss, Moorcock, Ballard, Heinlein and the like, was fucking MAJESTIC, but also because just reading the blurbs on the back of each title was so incredibly, madly evocative. It also meant I had access to some spectacularly-inappropriate material at a very young age, including the books of one Norman Spinrad, a genuinely incredible hipster countercultural imagination, whose novels include a fantasy epic written as though authored by Adolf Hitler and this masterpiece, set in a vague future US in which weed is legal, evil billionaires seek immortality through nefarious means, and the hottest TV show in the world is basically an investigative TiKToker. It also includes a frankly hilarious commitment to the use of the word ‘ball’ as a verb. 

Matt Muir lives in London and writes a newsletter called Web Curios, which is about 10,000 words every week on ‘stuff that he found interesting on the internet’. Matt also works as a ‘consultant’, whatever the fuck that means. 

Shelfies is edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin. If you are interested in sharing a shelfie, please let us know.