Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Books | September 30, 2025
Imajica by Clive Barker
I set myself the challenge for 2025 to be a year of slower and more conscious reading. No more rushing through 300-page works just to pad out my annual Goodreads goal. It was time to dedicate my mind to something with heft and take on a few daunting tasks I’d put off for several years. What could be more daunting than taking on the longest book in my TBR pile?
Clive Barker, the king of queer body horror and the beautiful grotesque, considers Imajica to be his magnum opus. By his own admission, he became obsessed with writing this weighty epic fantasy, and his first draft was 14,000 handwritten pages long. My battered paperback copy, courtesy of eBay, was 1136 pages, which still makes it the longest book I have ever read. You don’t really see Barker’s fantasy work recommended as frequently or enthusiastically as his genre-redefining horror stories, which is a shame because here is an author whose vast ambitions are so perfectly suited to it.
Where to start with Imajica? The title is the name given to the entirety of the interdimensional universe, which is divided into five parts. Once upon a time, Earth of the Fifth Dominion was part of this grand tapestry, but it has been separated from the other four parts for centuries now. Throughout history, great magicians called Maestros have tried to unite the five dominions, usually with terrible results. It’s been 200 years since the near-mythic Maestro Sartori tried and failed to make it happen. Now, a group of seeming disparate figures are brought together to travel the Imajica, uncover its crimes, and unite it once more… or annihilate it.
That sort of covers it, but like I said, this thing is over 1100 pages long. It’s a fever dream of religious imagery, high fantasy, genderqueer assassins, horror, political torture, detailed magic systems, generational trauma, and f*cking. It’s vast and wide-reaching and weird as hell. But there’s also a fascinating intimacy to it. Unlike many high fantasies, which are populated with dozens of characters, Imajica is almost entirely focused on a handful of people. One of them is a gender-shifting figure of power and desire whose pronouns are it and who is depicted with incredible deftness. This is a thoroughly adult fantasy, and not just because it’s got more than a few sex scenes to its name (come on, as if Clive would ever make a chaste book!) Barker is tackling weighty ideas - racial and sexual politics, AIDS, systemic abuse, corruption, censorship - and expects the reader to keep up with it. I’m not sure I always managed it myself because I definitely had to consult the Wiki summary more than once!
Fittingly for a Barker book, this is a highly indulgent read. I mean, look at it. 1136 pages. So, moments of diversion and detail sometimes overwhelm or take too much focus away from the plot. Barker reminds me a lot of one of my other favourite authors, Anne Rice, in their preferences for lavish prose and grandeur, often at the expense of narrative. And there’s a lot of narrative here we have to keep up with. Barker does a great job of bringing together some long plot threads, and you just have to accept that this is a commitment as a reader. But damn if I wasn’t hugely taken by Imajica. The pure invention on display just melted my brain.
American Tabloid // The Cold Six Thousand by James Ellroy
2025 has been the year of me jumping headfirst into the twisted worlds of James Ellroy. The demon dog of crime fiction was the writer who helped break me from my reading slump and his seedy nihilistic noirs have proven to be exactly what I needed in this year of hellish brainrot. Sometimes, when things are tough, you turn to escapism in your pop culture tastes. If you’re me, you run in the opposite direction.
The Underworld USA trilogy might be Ellroy’s crowning glory. The first two parts, American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand (I haven’t read the third one yet but stay tuned!), are flinty fever dreams of conspiracy and corruption that feel like guides through our current mirror-world. A group of thugs, fixers, and traitors move in the same circles of power. Pete Bondurant is a former cop who now does shakedowns for Howard Hughes. FBI agent Kemper Boyd is recruited by J. Edgar Hoover to infiltrate the Kennedy family. Ward Littell is another FBI agent who wants to take down organised crime and be on the good guys’ side for once. Wayne Tedrow Jr. is the son of a crooked casino owner and cop who desperately wants to separate himself from his family legacy. It won’t end well for any of them. Or America as a whole.
Imagine if every conspiracy you’d heard about the 1960s was true: the Cuban missile crisis, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy, the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa, the death of Lee Harvey Oswald, Howard Hughes, the Mormon takeover of Las Vegas, Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, the Nixon election, and many more. Now imagine the circumstances and people required to tie all of these red threads on the corkboard together and make a cohesive portrait of a nation rotting to pieces. The result is pitch black, utterly gripping, and 100% bananas.
There’s something about Ellroy’s descent into the rabbit hole of conspiratorial fervour that provides me with immense clarity on our current political circumstances. He lays out so compellingly why people are drawn to tinhat theories and how even the most nonsensical ideas have, if not some truth behind them, then at least a believability to their twisted narratives. Nobody thinks it’s all that unreasonable to imagine the archaic institutions of power clinging to relevance by bumping off anyone who dares to challenge them. History hasn’t debunked that one fully, let’s be honest.
Ellroy’s rat-a-tat-tat machine gun-fire dialogue is blunt, stripped of any beautifying qualities in favour of stark efficiency. Amid the chaos of this labyrinthine plot, we are kept updated on every minor detail, often through official documents and wiretaps (Hoover did love himself an illegal wiretap.) There are dozens of characters, including many real-life figures, and none of them could be described as heroic. Even anti-heroic feels too generous for these soldiers of corruption and abuse who are ‘just doing their jobs’ and tearing to shreds the very nation they treasure.
The Cold Six Thousand somehow manages to be even darker than its predecessor, in part because so much of its story is focused on Martin Luther King’s activism and the racist hierarchy of D.C. working to wreck his work. As with all Ellroy works, there are a lot of slurs here, capturing the casual and active malice of bigotry in action, and it’s as tough to read as you’d imagine. As propulsive a read as these books are, they leave you feeling exhausted but wanting more. I want to see how deep the rabbit hole goes. I think I need it. after all, it can’t go on forever, right?
Murder By Cheesecake by Rachel Ekstrom Courage
Fanfiction is very in these days. The days of hiding your slash fic from the masses are long gone in a post-50 Shades world. I wasn’t in the mood to read any of the surprisingly plentiful Draco/Hermione romantasy stories on the market, but I always have time for the Golden Girls. Okay, this is a tie-in novel and not fanfiction, but you get my point. AO3 sometimes shuts down for maintenance and you have to turn to something else to fill the void for a few hours.
Golden Girls is a great show to reshape into a cozy mystery in the vein of Murder, She Wrote. The quartet of cheesecake-loving BFFs living together in Florida were funny, nosy, and up for a challenge, or at the very least, likely to fall into the middle of a mess that they’d need to dig their way out of. Frankly, I’m in favour of more of my favourite TV shows being reinvented as cozy mysteries. Maybe Will Graham’s life would have been a hell of a lot easier had he only needed to worry about weirdly inconsequential murders that didn’t involve totem poles made out of people (someone please commission me to write this._
Murder by Cheesecake sees Rose playing host to the residents of St. Olaf as her niece prepares to marry. In order to claim her family inheritance, her wedding will need to adhere to all of her hometown’s weird traditions. Rose is determined to make it happen, even if the action’s been moved to the Sunshine State. Dorothy turns to a VHS dating service to land a date for the wedding, which ends with her being ghosted. Then the guy turns up dead, face down in a lingonberry cheesecake.
Credit must go to Rachel Ekstrom Courage, who is clearly a Golden Girls superfan and nailed the humour with her own take on the sitcom’s jokes. You get Dorothy’s dry wit, Rose’s guilelessness, Blanche’s proud horniness, and Sophia’s tangents on Sicily. A lot of the book is dedicated to Rose’s attempts at recreating the perfect St. Olaf wedding, full of traditions that could only have been created for the purposes of an early ’90s network sitcom. Courage clearly had a blast with these scenes, but they take over most of the book, including the mystery elements. The murder ends up feeling secondary to the A-plot of a wedding, and that’s just not what we’re here for. We want to see Dorothy be our new J.B. Fletcher! Why do I have to spend so many pages reading about hotel booking problems? All that and the reveal of the culprit feels pretty rushed. Still, I think this is a concept with potential, and a sequel is coming soon. I hope the author irons out the kinks. And yes, there is a cheesecake recipe at the end of the book.
