‘The End of Everything’

The End of Everything (2026) is a literary science fiction novel by M John Harrison. It’s been longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize.

In the story, Phillip Tennent lives by the sea in an impoverished future Britain. Communication with mainland Europe has broken down. New life forms exist in the sea. He ekes out a living by scavenging washed up objects and strange lifeforms from the sea shore.

The novel is a post-Brexit story, much like The Wall (2019) by John Lanchester, and Doggerland (2020) by Ben Smith. These three novels involve the sea, an isolated Britain, and a post-apocalyptic future.

The End of Everything is a work of literary science fiction. Where genre science fiction demands logical rules and a payoff with an explanation, literary science fiction keeps the world building relatively vague, focusing instead on the language and experience of the characters within that world.

In The End of Everything the narrative inhabits a dreamlike state. Part magical realism, part surreal metaphor. The lack of specificity enhances its mystery. It allows the story to operate as a cypher, a metaphor that’s open to interpretation. The world of the story operates in what feels like a surreal purgatory, a twilight world with sea dwelling lifeforms that have undergone a magical transformation, a rebirth even.

‘Lars Shrike Walks the Night’

Somewhere in a distant galaxy… the protagonist of what looks like a 1970s era science fiction film wanders around the empty desert of a prison planet. He is desperate to escape but, suffering from amnesia, he must first work out who he is. Is he the product of a failed space experiment, a clone, or something worse?

Lars Shrike Walks the Night is Stranger Than Fiction meets K-PAX. The story explores the strange relationship between writers’ and their characters. The film examines reality, identity, and existence.

There are echoes of Vanilla Sky, The Truman Show, Fight Club, Total Recall and Shutter Island. All these stories ask the same two questions. Who am I? What is real?

So, who is Lars Shrike?

Kelsey Grammer plays Lars Shrike in this low budget science fiction film written and directed by Gary Walkow. I was expecting a classic redemptive story – a homeless amnesiac rediscovers his previous life. But, Lars Shrike Walks the Night takes a slightly different angle and does it with subversive humour.

‘Backrooms’

Backrooms (2026) is a psychological horror. The film is directed by Kane Parsons, who previously worked on YouTube shorts. He has faithfully adapted his YouTube ‘backrooms’ videos for cinema.

In Backrooms, Clark’s big dream is to be a successful architect, but his ambitions have led to failure, alcoholism, and the collapse of his long term relationship. Now he lives in the furniture store that he manages. When he discovers a portal to another world he takes a journey into a strange land. The journey (like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness) accelerates his mental decline.

The story takes place in 1990, in an analogue, pre-internet world. It uses the ‘liminal spaces’ YouTube meme, which is a kind of distorted parallel reality. This world is accessed through an invisible portal in a wall, in the basement of his furniture store.

What are the backrooms? The environment is a place of creepy surreal horror, a metaphor rather than a space for absolute science fiction. It’s more Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland than 2001. Visually, it’s part computer game glitch, part Freudian psycho-geography, and part abandoned space. There are echoes of the zone in Stalker and the area in Annihilation. ‘Found footage’ and effective sound design enhance the atmosphere.

What is the story? Clark’s nowhere life leads him to the discovery of the backrooms – a nowhere place. The backrooms are a classic nightmare experience, a labyrinth with a monster, or a haunted house with ghosts. This strange place is a test of his resilience and a visual metaphor for Clark’s mental disintegration or ‘miss-rememberings’.

The film picks up in the last twenty minutes with a mind blowing MC Escher moment and a monster that’s both frightening and comical. It’s a slow build story. The pace may alienate some people, but it pays off in the end.

‘Obsession’

With a reputed budget of $750,000, Obsession has already taken $374 million at the box office. 2026 has seen two films – Obsession and Backrooms – provide an antidote to mainstream Hollywood’s big budget superhero ‘IP’ movies. Years of Disco eventually produced the backlash of Punk. Could years of the special effects dominated superhero moviez produce a return to the low-budget indie flick? Maybe. Maybe not.

Obsession is a contemporary horror. It’s Eraserhead meets The Shining meets The Exorcist meets Midsommar with cringe-horror moments and the magical premise of Big. Stylistically it’s dark, literally a dark aesthetic of shadows and silhouettes often with a deep focus.

When the weak protagonist makes a wish for his crush to love him more than anyone else in the world, her love becomes extreme, toxic, and violent. She turns into a deranged psychopath. The moral of the story is clear – be careful what you wish for.

The film moves through a series of tonally different modes. Normality mode (indie movie romcom), creepy mode (psychological horror), and violent confrontation mode (shock horror). Each mode is spliced together with a deliberately jarring jump-cut. Each one also provides a heightening of the tension followed by a reset at the start of the next section – the protagonist forgives his girlfriend and they makeup. It’s a partial reversion to normality.

In the first of these mode switches, the protagonist goes from almost instant infatuation with his crush (indie movie romcom mode) to immediately backing off from her (psychological horror mode). This poses questions about believability, but every time you question the story, the pace pushes ahead, producing some genuinely scary, shock horror frights.

‘The Expansion Project’

We’ve all been to The Expansion Project, an ordinary day in the office when you feel like you’re not really there. Maybe you aren’t?

The Expansion Project is a literary science fiction novel by Ben Pester. It explores the unreality of the workplace as a metaphor for life. It’s David Graber’s Bullshit Jobs expressed in a work of fiction. The workplace as a simulation in a Philip K Dick novel. A liminal space in Backrooms or Exit 8. It’s the alien world of Annihilation. The ‘zone’ from Stalker. Whatever The Expansion Project is… it’s a bizarre and surreal place that’s been archived at some point in the distant future by an archivist who also isn’t ‘feeling it’.

There is no satisfying explanation telling us what it’s all about. This is literary science fiction, after all, not genre fiction. So, it’s the experience of the narrative and the language that is the destination rather than a story arc with a conclusion to the journey.

Literary science fiction seems to be having something of a renaissance. Much like the death of the Western genre spawned literary Westerns like Blood Meridian – the current stasis of the science fiction genre has seen the rise of literary science fiction novels like Klara and the Sun, Machines Like Me, The Second Sleep, and now The Expansion Project.

‘Exit 8’

Genki Kawamura’s film Exit 8 (2025) is a psychological horror about a man who is stuck in an endlessly looping subway corridor. It’s David Lynch meets The Shining meets M C Escher. The film is based on the computer game The Exit 8.

Exit 8 is a so-called ‘liminal space’ horror. The sub-genre has become a meme in 2026 with the release Backrooms. A liminal space is a place that people pass through on their way to somewhere else. These are typically anonymous corridors in public areas. They operate as ‘portals’ into another reality. They are psychologically charged and present the protagonist with a surreal, labyrinth-like puzzle to escape from. They may be an ordinary place, transformed by time, an empty school during the summer vacation, a hotel in the off-season, or a closed down shopping mall. The atmosphere is one of claustrophobia and being locked in. The space symbolically expresses the protagonist’s mind, their memories, and inner trauma.

The liminal space has been around for a long time – the creepy swimming pool in Cat People (1942), the bombed city at night in The Third Man (1949), the zone in Stalker (1979), the empty streets of Vivarium (2019), the weird purgatory world of Last Year at Marienbad (1961), episodes of Black Mirror, The Twilight Zone, and Severance, computer games like Silent Hill (1999) and, perhaps most famously, the hotel corridors of Kubrick’s The Shining. These places all share the same surreal and uncanny psychogeography.

Exit 8 fuses multiple horror sub-genres, from surrealism, to the ‘locked in’ story and the repeated loop story structure of films like Groundhog Day (1993). It uses horror to expresses an experience of modern life – the doom loop of endless scrolling, the personal isolation of noise cancelling headphones – the anxiety of feeling disconnected from the world around us, and from ourselves.

‘Widow’s Bay’

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Widow’s Bay (Season 1) is a horror comedy set on the fictional New England island of Widow’s Bay. The show has similarities to Lost – it features people who are stuck on an island that appears to be a focus for supernatural forces beyond their control.

Matthew Rhys is well cast as the town’s mayor along Kate O’Flynn as his assistant. There is a charming quirkiness in the first four episodes where the comedy horror is played straight. The audience is unsure if the ‘dark forces’ are real or imagined. Then the story moves into more of a straight horror drama.

The production values, performances and writing has been excellent. The writer’s appear to have moved the dramatic climax forward, into episodes 5,6, 7, and 8, with episodes 9 and 10 settling back into something of an end of season lull.

There’s a lot going on in this season – a struggling mayor keeping the island’s tourist attractions open (very much like the mayor in Jaws), a visit to the island’s dark historical past, a Halloween meets It Follows chase episode, a variety of monsters and creepy apparitions, a drug experience episode, the theme of a father struggling to have a meaningful relationship with his son, and interactions of an eccentric group of unlikely buddies (a ‘band of heroes’) fighting for their friends and the island’s community.

It will be interesting to see where the writers take Widow’s Bay in Season 2. I can see it turning into a quirky soap opera meets Stranger Things for adults.

‘Audition’

Audition is a novel by Katie Kitamura. It was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize and it was a finalist for the 2026 Pulitzer Prize.

The story – written in first person, past tense – explores the narrator’s experience of being an actress, a wife, and a ‘mother’. The stage and thespian world are used as a backdrop to the explain the disconnected happenstance, the acted out ‘unreality’ of the real world. Stage craft is contextualised with people acting out their relationships.

At first, I was expecting more of a plotted drama, but then I realised that this is a literary fiction experience that’s primarily about nuance and the nature of existence. The story is framed through the woman’s encounter with a young man who claims to be her son – even though she knows that he’s lying. He inserts himself into her life in an act of ‘brood parasitism’, appearing like a cuckoos egg in a warbler’s nest.

The stranger as ‘kin’ scenario is a literary metaphor for the close distance of relationships, where people are intimate with one another and yet emotionally detached.

‘Flesh’

David Szalay’s Flesh won the 2025 Booker Prize. The title Flesh conjures up nihilism or hedonism, neither of which particularly appeals to me. So, it’s taken a while to overcome that barrier and read the novel. Flesh is not nihilist or hedonistic. And much of the commentary about the novel gets it wrong. Reviews have focused on the ‘minimalistic’ prose, the overly ‘passive’ protagonist, and the frequent use of one word dialogue, like ‘okay’ and ‘yeah’.

After reading the novel, I can say that the text does have some elaborate prose, so it’s not as minimalist as people might imagine. And when the flourishes happen they feel slightly incongruous next to the sparse dialogue, but it does provide a contrast. The accusation of the story having a ‘passive’ protagonist is a bit weird. The protagonist is an ordinary man, a ‘regular guy’ with faults. He is unlucky in some ways, lucky in others. He has anger management issues and he doesn’t appear to be in touch with himself. He’s traumatised by life. The one word dialogue does become repetitive, even if it’s there to illustrate human disconnection.

The long time span, aspects of the prose style, and the use of condensed vignettes reminds me of Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13. The sexual and self-discovery dimension has echoes of Stephen Vizinczey’s novel In Praise of Older Women (which is also about the life of Hungarian man). One final comparison is the human journey in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

So, what is Flesh? It’s the story of a man’s life, from adolescence to middle age. The narrative provokes questions about life choices and living a meaningful life.

The overnight story

Eyes Wide Shut

The overnight story is a journey into a strange land. It’s the same place as the daylight world but magically transformed by darkness into a new reality. This shadow world has its own rules and possibilities. It’s a place where the protagonists will face their fears. They will encounter wonderful, strange – and often terrifying – characters. They will be forced into a new understanding of reality. The compressed format of the overnight story works perfectly in films. It’s less optimised for the expansiveness of novels.

Time is ticking. As surely as day turns to night, dawn will arrive in the morning. The protagonist must survive the night. And, if they have a quest – they must achieve it before sunrise.

In the overnight story, adolescents will find meaning, love and friendship in films like The Myth of the American Sleepover, Before Sunrise, Dazed and Confused, and American Graffiti. Monsters will emerge in Night of the Living Dead and From Dusk Till Dawn. A hostage crisis will be resolved in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and Die Hard. A traitor will be avenged in The Long Goodbye. An unpalatable truth will emerge in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Enemies will be defeated in The Warriors. A safe middle-class existence will be turned upside down in After Hours and Eyes Wide Shut. The occupants of a police station will survive the night in Assault on Precinct 13.

When morning comes, the world will be the same again, but the protagonists will be changed forever.