Here at Rotten Poetry we don’t like to make New Year Resolutions. We prefer to use the turning of the clock to make intentions instead.So we decided to ask some of our team and collaborators what their reading plans were for 2025. Charlotte – I have spent the last two years chasing reading challenges on… Continue reading
New Year, New Books!
Category: Books & Literature
Trump; and Dystopian Fiction.
What makes a good dystopian tale? A lot of attention had recently been drawn to Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, A Handmaid’s Tale. The reason? The book itself shows the downfall of American society from the liberty to the exact opposite. For women at least. At first women are fired from their jobs before seeing the… Continue reading Trump; and Dystopian Fiction.
Not so Sweet Pea.
You may have noticed a new TV series on Sky called Sweet Pea. What you might not realise is that there is a series of books by CJ Skuse. I recently read the first one (titled Sweet Pea) to see what all the fuss was about. What I found was a wonderfully sardonic first hand… Continue reading Not so Sweet Pea.
Book to film – the good, the bad and the downright disastrous.
Book to film. The following blog post contains spoilers. We’ve all been there. Sitting in the cinema, the film has finished, the lights go up. And we say, “The book was better.” Of course, some book to film adaptations are better than others. But no one will ever make the perfect adaptation because no two… Continue reading Book to film – the good, the bad and the downright disastrous.
Davey MacManus – Bluster Boy
Last week we announced the incredibly exciting news that we will be publishing the new book by Davey MacManus, The Bluster Boy. This is so exciting to me particularly because in the years when my music taste developed and grew Davey was the enigmatic front man of a couple of my favourite bands; The Crocketts… Continue reading Davey MacManus – Bluster Boy
Burn, Witch, Burn. Stories of Witches.
There has been a huge upturn recently in the number of books about witches and witchcraft. Practicing witchcraft, being a witch, has become almost trendy. But literature, like society, has taken its time to get here. Let’s go back to when witches were dragged into popular culture kicking and screaming. The witch trials and the… Continue reading Burn, Witch, Burn. Stories of Witches.
Writing Heather, Chasing Dreams
My debut novel, Heather, is released today (21 June 2024). This is life-long dream territory. And it still doesn’t feel quite real. Nightmare I started writing Heather when I was 20 years old. The idea came to me during a nightmare when I was living in a rented flat above a video rental shop in… Continue reading Writing Heather, Chasing Dreams
According to Stephen King’s The Running Man, next year will be intense.
According to Stephen King’s The Running Man, next year will be intense. It’s 2025 and 28-year-old Ben Richards is living in a dystopian America. The economy is in the toilet and the country is run by a totalitarian state. The gap between rich and poor is so vast that the poor have been pushed to… Continue reading According to Stephen King’s The Running Man, next year will be intense.
The Train was on Time – Regret, Reverence and Remembrance
The Train was on Time (Der Zug war pünktlich) by Heinrich Böll is a short novel following the journey of a German soldier, Andreas, returning from leave to Przemyśl in Poland to rejoin the fighting on the Eastern Front in 1942. From the early stages Andreas senses his own death coming and spends much of… Continue reading The Train was on Time – Regret, Reverence and Remembrance
Thérèse Raquin – Zola’s Putrid Exploration of Guilt and Punishment
Around 2002 I was working in Our Price. I would spend a lot of time talking to lots of people about music and films, but also books. It was in one of these conversations with a customer; I must’ve been talking about my love of French literature, around that time I was devouring all the… Continue reading Thérèse Raquin – Zola’s Putrid Exploration of Guilt and Punishment