So. My plan is to take them off the right hand end, and keep adding to the left hand end. I’m actually currently reading Infinite Jest already, but as it’s quite big and it’ll take me a while yet, I’ve included it.

I think because IJ is quite big, I’ve arranged for a few relatively short books to follow. These are mostly books I’ve had for a long time, and I’ve been looking forward to them for ages. I’ve had the comic-book Joseph, by Nicolas Robel, for years, but because it’s so small I had actually lost it between two other books.

There are ten novels, two non-fiction books, three anthologies, two short story collections, and the aforementioned comic.

1. Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace

2. Everything’s Fine – Socrates Adams

3. The Best British Short Stories 2011 – Edited by Nicholas Royle

4. Vault – David Rose (not the David Rose that may somehow be connected to Johann Hari, but another one)

5. Joseph – Nicolas Robel

6. Richard Yates – Tao Lin

7. Screwtop Thompson – Magnus Mills

8. A Matter of Blood – Sarah Pinborough

9. The Reluctant Fundamentalist – Mohsin Hamid

10. A Book of Horrors – Edited by Stephen Jones

11. Gutshot – Edited by Conrad Williams

12. King Rat – China Mieville

13. Salem’s Lot – Stephen King

14. Department 19 – Will Hill

15. Bleeding, Blisters and Opium: Joshua Dixon and the Whitehaven Dispensary – Michael Sydney

16. Nightmare Movies - Kim Newman

17. The Picture of Dorian Grey – Oscar Wilde

18. The Illustrated Man – Ray Bradbury

One other reason I wanted to put all of these books together in one place was so that I could kind of lust over them, in an anticipatory kind of way, a kind of feel-a-warm-glow-of-excitement every time I walk past the shelf kind of thing. And I do, almost. Except what occurs to me mostly when I look at these books is that only one is by a woman. A Matter of Blood, by Sarah Pinborough. And although I will be slipping The War Tour by Zoe Lambert surreptitiously in towards the right-hand end when I finally get a copy, that’s still only two. Yes, there are female writers in the three anthologies but the anthologies are all edited by men, and anyway, that doesn’t restore balance.

It’ll be a while before I buy any more books I think, but when I do get to that point I’ll be bearing this in mind. Not because I feel guilty about it, but because I want to read widely. I want to read a variety of things by a variety of different authors and types of author.

What do your to-be-read piles / shelves look like? What do you notice, looking at them, that maybe you wouldn’t have noticed if you hadn’t arranged them as such? Do you arrange them at all? Maybe you are sensible, and don’t.

It’s a good question. My personal approach (when writing) is to have all of the logic and explanations worked out, but only include the details that are appropriate to the narrative viewpoint. It was easier with THE LEAPING than with THE THING ON THE SHORE, because the point of the horror in THE LEAPING was that it was random and nihilistic and ‘why me?’, like the cancer suffered by the protagonist’s father. I struggled to know where to draw the line between explanation and mystery in THE THING ON THE SHORE, though.

But what I really wanted to add to the conversation was my feelings as a reader. And my feelings as a reader are that I don’t want anything much explained at the end of a book, to be honest. Genre aside, I don’t want everything wrapped up. If when I get to the last line of the last page of a book all of my questions are answered, then I forget the book more quickly. A neat ending makes a book easier to swallow, and I don’t want that. I want a book that feels like it’s stuck in the throat. The mind’s throat. An angular book with sharp corners that leaves grooves in the mind’s throat for the mind’s tongue to probe at, to keep returning to. I want to read books that I’ll remember, and I remember books that leave me with questions, not answers. Books that make me feel something exactly not the warm glow of resolution, basically. Not always, but often.

That’s what I like to read, and that’s what I’d like to write. When I work out how to do it in horror fiction without leaving readers feeling cheated, then, well, hopefully you’ll let me know.

you are tom fletcher and you appear to be a writer. i know nothing about you. are you a good writer? i have no clue. you seem like one though. i can tell because i googled you. i made the mistake of typing tom fletcher sans writer after your name. on my screen came a tom fletcher who isn’t like you. this tom fletcher looks like he’s trying too hard. fucking insane. i like my tom fletcher’s to not have highlights. no look at me attitude. your the REAL tom fletcher dammit. and i’m the captain of the tom fletcher crew. do you write poetry? fiction? nonfiction? don’t have the slightest the clue. what do you care anyway. your at the top of your game probably. i’m just a little person for whom you don’t have time. life for tom fletcher must be sublime. you seem like a sophisticated londoner. maybe i’m wrong but you exude high class energy. you would never associate with me. i’m from the bottomless pit known as new jersey. so tom fletcher who is allegedly from london and is not the freak who originally came up on my google search. please continue writing and purging your hurt. the world needs you. there’s only one you. when i find the time to pick up one of your books my life will change guaranteed. as i flip through the pages i’ll never curse the day of discovering this gem. but mostly i’ll be relieved. relieved that that tom fletcher the writer i don’t hate like that imposter vehemently.