Prose read in February. As you can see, I really kept it light in terms of subject matter last month – well, until the end of the month, when I started juggling It’s Complicated, about the online lives of teenagers, and Sticks & Stones, about high school bullying. What can I say? I like to try something else occasionally.

Of the books above, the Westlakes are by far the best. The two 2000AD spin-off digital novellas are… okay? They’re entirely enjoyable but also relatively lightweight, although the Dredd one feels like it could’ve/should’ve been a great strip from the series’ first 200 issues or so. Al Ewing’s Gods of Manhattan is wonderfully pulpy, if at times a little too on-the-nose with its references and easter eggs – although it, and the Westlakes, really got me thinking about pulp literature and what constitutes “good” shitty reading, if that makes sense (Good “shitty” reading, perhaps?). Something I’ll have to explore further, I think.

Song of Spider-Man is a quick book – I think I read it in an afternoon, enjoying the gossipy tone/subject of it all – as opposed to The Message, which really struggles (and, ultimately, fails in my opinion) to come together as a whole.

Last of all, Red Moon, which was a book selected for a book club that I joined (Yes, I joined a book club). Suffice to say, it’s very much not my thing. I like shitty genre books as much as the next person – hell, probably more, as you can see above – but this one was a mess that felt like it was the most cynical, ill-considered project you could imagine. Picture an author saying “What if we did Twilight, but the entire series in one book, and it’s also about 9/11 and race, and I’ll mix up terrorists with muslims and every oppressed minority in the metaphor just to make things really complicated!” and you can pretty much imagine what it’s like. Just horrendous.