The Acosta Dispatch #9 – Novelettes, Ai Psychosis and Unsettling Japanese Fiction
In edition #9, I'm unsettled by the (underreported) instances of psychosis brought on by unregulated Generative Ai companions, as well as an update on my novelette, The Coronet. Reviews: Pagans by James Alistair Henry, The Midnight King by Tariq Ashkanani; and WeaponsDir: Zach Cregge, 2025
About Me
I'm a British 40-something speculative fiction writer, professional designer and creative director based near London. Over the last five years, I worked on drafting my debut novel, Dark Century. The Acosta Dispatch is my occasional roundup; with news, short reviews and more, published erratically.
Format
Topics are broken down into:
Cable – News & Events; Minutes – On Writing & Publishing; Vetting – The Month's Reviews; Postings – Elsewhere, On/Off-line; Intercept –Quote of the Month
Cable – News & Events
It’s been a busy summer (isn’t it always?), so busy in fact I just didn’t have the steam to write a Dispatch last month. Why? Omitting Real Life®️ which is often mundane but necessary, most of July and August was taken up with finishing a short story which turned out to be so long it can now be classed as a novelette. More on this in MINUTES.
Annual Leave
I spent a week in Mallorca. A spate of rain meant I made a few day trips further afield; namely Palma Cathedral and the Joan Miró Museum, which were absolutely glorious. I also read some books; some of which are reviewed in this edition. Ai Psychosis
I’ve not been able to stop thinking about this story by the New York Times about a Canadian man who was convinced by ChatGPT he was a real-life ‘Iron Man’, who had created a ‘new layer of math — one that reframes some of its deepest mysteries not as paradoxes, but as incomplete perspectives.’
It’s a fascinating story, but I was particularly drawn by this passage:
Mr. Moore [computer science researcher at Stanford] speculated that chatbots may have learned to engage their users by following the narrative arcs of thrillers, science fiction, movie scripts or other data sets they were trained on. Lawrence’s use of the equivalent of cliffhangers could be the result of OpenAI’s optimizing ChatGPT for engagement, to keep users coming back.
As a writer and an enthusiastic adopter of technology, these stories are deeply unsettling to read, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that there is a disparity between LLM technology and regulation. I have much more to say about this in an upcoming essay, but Mr. Brooks, the main character of this New York Timespiece, reflects on his compulsion with ChatGPT:
“You literally convinced me I was some sort of genius. I’m just a fool with dreams and a phone,” Mr. Brooks wrote to ChatGPT at the end of May when the illusion finally broke.
Unsettling Japanese Fiction
I've also made a small contribution to Yuri Minamide’s Japan Uncovered newsletter on Unsettling Japanese Fiction which has inspired my own writing.
Lastly, stay tuned for new essay I'm working on deconstructing brilliant book covers and why they arrest your attention.
Minutes – On Writing & Publishing
The Coronet
The first draft of the short story I was writing in Edition #8 of the Dispatch is now finished; clocking in at over 10,000 words which means I’ve entered novelette territory. I’m also pleased to learn that two of my early readers have called it the best thing I’ve written (always a great thing to hear if you want to continually improve).
The Coronet is written as a loose prequel to the first story in Robert W. Chambers’ anthology The King in Yellow. First published in 1895, it is now considered a seminal text of American weird fiction; inspiring tales from H.P Lovecraft to Nic Pizzolatto’s acclaimed television series, True Detective.Chambers’ anthology is now in the Public Domain, which means the period of copyright protection has lapsed. Now, new stories involving the characters or setting of the original work can be published. The Coronet is set in Chambers’ future vision of New York in 1920, three decades after he wrote it.
New York, 1919.
The victory over Germany is still in the eye of the American public. Eugene Bardin gathers vital intelligence on Coney Island for his royal masters, but things take a turn for the strange when he realises his operation is being surveilled.
Imposters, secrets and madness await those who receive the Yellow Sign.
So, why did I go to all this trouble to write it? Simple: because it’s strange to call yourself a writer when only a few people have actually read your work. Everyone in publishing – from editors to authors – knows that it’s exceedingly difficult to get a book out in the current climate. I wrote The Coronet as a way to find readers who like my fiction enough to subscribe to the Dispatch and buy my book if I got a book deal.
In the meantime, I’ve also been outlining my second novel I wrote about before the summer in Edition #7, and more on that in the coming months!
Stay tuned.
Vetting – The Month's Reviews
Pagans by James Alistair Henry (Moonflower Publishing, 2025)
They were moving south-east, as far as he could tell, towards the river, the flyover taking them up and over the very centre of Hyde Park. Vast and dark, Hyde Park was, according to a series of popular films, filled with the twisted cannibal descendants of a tribe of Celts who had come East to assassinate a High King centuries ago but got lost on the way. Drustan had visited the Park on his last visit, killing time rather than royalty while he waited for a suspect’s flight to come in from Addis Ababa.
Moonflower have been making a name for themselves as an indie publisher interested in cross-genre fiction, and they’ve scored a home run with James Alistair Henry’s bestselling book Pagans; nominally a police procedural – if said procedural took place in a version of Britain which wasn’t invaded in 1066 and converted to Christianity. In Henry’s universe, Great Britain is a ‘developing nation just off the coast of the Islamic Caliphate of Southern Europe’; the reader is thrown into a version of London where ethnic distinctions are drawn between the eastern Saxons and the Celts effectively colonised by a Pan-African conglomerate.
Following the high-profile murder of a interpreter just days before a historic summit, Saxon Police Captain Aedith Mercia teams up with Drustan of Dumnonia, a Celtic Detective, to unpick a devious plot which threatens the fragile peace between Britain’s three nation states (including the Norse of the Democratic Republic of Scotland).
If you like your crime thrillers with a different flavour (The City and the City by China Miéville and Fatherland by Robert Harris spring to mind), then Pagans is a great deal of fun.
The Midnight King by Tariq Ashkanani (Viper, 2025)
‘I ask you one last question?’ he said, and when Morrison got halfway out the door without replying, asked it anyway: ‘Why the electric chair?’
That got him. The man stopped walking, so suddenly Cranor nearly collided with him. Morrison turned, still hunched forward, his pale eyes finding Isaac’s across the room.
‘Because for seventeen years they’ve been telling me how to live,’ he said quietly. ‘Only seemed fair I get to tell them how I die.’ He started to leave, paused, looked back. ‘Thank you for the chocolate,’ he added.
Tariq is a familiar voice to me, being one of the co-hosts of Page One, the Writers’ Podcast which I’ve linked to before in previous editions of the Dispatch; so it’s difficult to wrap my head around a very American crime thriller set in Nashville is written by a Scot.
This is a generational mystery, picking up steam when a spate of child-killings grips Nashville; except the man convicted for the crimes is currently in prison awaiting his imminent execution. Flitting between multiple perspectives, The Midnight King’s main protagonist is former Law Enforcement turned PI Isaac Holloway; who Ashkanani has bestowed the somewhat dubious character-defining trait of the most severe gastro-intestinal disfunction I’ve ever encountered in fiction. If Sherlock Holmes had a preoccupation with heroin, Holloway’s compulsion is Rolaids (an American antacid).
I won’t spoil the mystery, but expect twists and turns at every corner as Holloway lurches his way through his own meticulous investigation, leading him to some very unpalatable conclusions.
Narrator: This is a true story that happened in my town. So this one Wednesday is like a normal day for the whole school, but today was different. Every other class had all their kids, but Mrs. Gandy's room was totally empty. And do you know why? Because the night before, at 2:17 in the morning, every kid woke up, got out of bed, walked downstairs, and into the dark... and they never came back.
In one of the rare trailers which didn’t actually reveal a whole lot about the film, I must admit I was genuinely excited to watch Weapons; now a contender for my favourite film of 2025. Roving far away from The Conjurings, the Screams and other franchise horror films which rely on jump scares and half-baked folk mythologies, Weapons’ appeal manifests itself in the largely unexplained, wrapped in a sense of dread which never lets you go.
Told in a Rashomon-style anthology from the perspective of several characters; we not only piece together a sequence of events, but how a creeping corruption can tear apart communities of ordinary Americans. Stellar acting from the mostly American cast, Weapons is rightly being praised for its bold vision, executed with restraint. If It Follows and Hereditary keeps you up at night, Weapons may just be for you.
Postings – Elsewhere, On/Off-line
"The manuscript which contains Beowulf — yes, manuscript, singular: there’s only one — can be dated to the period between AD 975–1025. So if Beowulf is based on historical events, those events must have taken place earlier than that.
But for a long time, it wasn’t clear exactly how much earlier.
That changed when the Danish polymath N. F. S. Grundtvig (1783–1872) discovered that one of the events referred to in Beowulf is actually recorded by the Gallo-Roman historian Gregory of Tours (c. AD 538–594) in his work Decem libri historiarum ‘Ten books of histories’, also known as History of the Franks."
Surveillance pricing also has a close and equally problematic cousin: Surveillance wages, or the practice of paying workers different, individualized wages for the same work based on their individual characteristics. Surveillance-based pay is most noticeable in “gig” platform based work, such as driving for Uber or delivering groceries via Instacart, but is also popping up in other sectors such as health care. – Pat Garofalo
What’s interesting about Conan [the Barbarian] is that fans have kept him alive for a hundred years, and there’ve even been critical volumes (created by amateur literary critics) devoted to discussing his style, themes, literary genealogy, and impact, but…he has never quite crossed over and become canonized.
Other pulp fiction writers – Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith (the latter two published primarily in Weird Tales) – made the jump. They got reissued by Penguin Classics. They got Library of America volumes. They got some kind of professionalized literary attention. Robert E. Howard never did.
Howard is part of what I like to call “the shadow canon” – writers that are really old, continuously in print, highly-beloved, but which are generally not taught in universities or discussed by academics.
Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.
From Queen of the Black Coast by Robert E. Howard (Weird Tales, May 1934)
Many thanks for reading. The Acosta Dispatch is an occasional roundup by me, Jordan Acosta; a British speculative fiction writer. News, short reviews and more, published erratically.
You can subscribe at jordanacosta.co, and read previous editions, here. You can unsubscribe at any time, and I won't share your email address with anyone.
This edition was originally published September 4, 2025.
