This latest collection contains stories of quietly devastating precision, in which ordinary men are undone by guilt, obsession, and the uncanny weight of their own pasts — sleepwalking through lives of their own making until something forces them, brutally, awake. ‘Some Pastel Morning’ is as delicate and poignant as the Degas works it references, the narrative spiralling around the sensation of absence felt by a mother and son separated by some unspecified disaster. Missy, recently arrived in the city in the disaster’s wake, appears to conjure a child through the act of representation. Is Hemingway — Missy’s son — real, or merely a manifestation of her longing for human connection? His appearance in the narrative, as a survivor of the disaster, seems to erase Missy’s presence entirely, so that even her drawing of him is gone. The story touches on memory and identity, themes explored more explicitly elsewhere in the collection.

 

‘Throttle Body’ plays with reader — and film audience — expectations, particularly within genre fiction, as Hook explores the conflicting emotions of Ward, a film studies lecturer, after he hits and kills a pedestrian one evening while driving his daughter after watching a movie. After failing to stop, he tells his daughter, who had been sleeping, that they hit a deer. Whether his eyes were on the road at the moment of impact is left uncertain. A similar scene had unfolded in the horror film they’d watched earlier, prompting a discussion of the tropes genre audiences require to feel satisfied — tropes Ward has lectured on himself, citing Godard and Cronenberg, and one of his preoccupations is the length of time drivers in film spend not looking at the road. He begins to feel “trapped by his own definitions and observances,” as though at the moment of impact he had become a protagonist in one of the films he discusses. On first reading I felt some sympathy for Ward, hit-and-run notwithstanding. Rereading, I was struck instead by his indifference to his victim: he returns to the scene and watches the body from his car, waiting for signs of life, remaining clear-headed enough to sanitise his hands and pull on latex gloves — already in the car, unexplained — before dragging the body into the undergrowth. In a deliberate subversion of the cliché his daughter had named, the mechanic who later examines his car tells him it sustained no damage when he hit the deer. Neither we, nor Ward, know what to make of it. The story closes with Ward in the back seat while his daughter Indy drives, chatting to a friend beside her, before turning to tell him she can drive just as well as he can. The car continues to pick up speed, with Indy still staring at her father, her arms mimicking huge turns of the steering wheel — a moment of pure Lynchian absurdity and terror.

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Matthew, the protagonist of ‘The Enfilade’, is a young photographer in the early nineties, persuaded by his friend Pryce into a trip to India. He experiences something close to sensory overload — repulsed by a stench of urine, dung and rubbish jostling against spice, jasmine and incense — while Pryce immerses himself fully in the unfamiliar streets. After drinking bhang, a cannabis-laced yoghurt, Matthew loses sight of his friend and spends days alone, only later realising Pryce has disappeared entirely. It’s four years before Matthew learns what became of him, though Hook has seeded the direction early: Matthew has already noted they are both “still unformed, malformed personalities,” with “nothing remarkable” about either. Pryce, given to vaguely metaphysical remarks — “there’s some countries where they believe taking your picture captures your soul” is a significant example, one that foreshadows what’s to come — seems almost predestined for total submersion into an alien culture, though nothing about his eventual return to England, and his request that Matthew photograph him with a group of friends, is predictable. From here the unease that's been lingering below the surface begins to rise, and Hook draws a quiet correlation between the story’s destabilising drift and the disorienting visual effect of the enfilade itself. It's a quietly devastating piece of horror fiction.

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Photography is also central to ‘The Malaise Trap’, another subtle and disturbing tale, one that explores the possibility of reversing the role of the spectator. The idea is voiced explicitly by Veronika, who photographs extreme close-ups of insects, while she manipulates an image of a fly’s compound eye — trying to achieve an effect in which the viewer doesn’t realise the image is looking back, that they’ve become “the viewed, the object, the subject.” Her relationship with boyfriend Jackson feels fractured, marked by doubt and restriction, and the malaise trap she’s built to photograph insects at the instant they hit the mesh becomes a physical correlate for their stagnation — the camera “fixing them in black and white, paparazzing them for her September exhibition.” The image resonates all the more at the story’s climax, when a far more startling one is captured in the trap.

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Art, and its power to destabilise the viewer, sits at the heart of ‘The Redeemers’, another superb study in obsession, taking its title — to my surprise — from a real sculpture by John Davies. Seeing the work at an exhibition, depicting two life-size, dark-suited figures, one draped in an incongruous head-scarf, the other leaning into him, Bates experiences a hallucinatory seizure that accelerates the collapse of his marriage to Carol. After their breakup, he commissions performance artist Krill to stage a tableau vivant of the piece, hoping to relive that first frisson. When Bates restates the strict conditions of the commission, Krill turns the transaction back on him: to redeem is “to gain or regain possession of something in exchange for payment.” The build-up to the tableau’s first appearance is precisely handled, as unsettling for the reader as for Bates, and as the story moves toward its uncanny, understated close, Bates drifts further from himself — much as he’d already drifted from Carol. The accumulation of incident and detail reinforce the sense of dislocation. At one point, amnesiac after another encounter with the tableau, he finds himself on a train, miles from home, holding a novel called The Faceless; at another, the figures reappear at night posed at the end of his bed, until he sees them replicated in the walls and fabric of his own bedroom. After that it becomes almost impossible for him not to see them everywhere, and as his sense of self unravels, he becomes, like a forgotten work of art, practically invisible to those around him.

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A chance meeting between a bully and his old victim supplies the engine of ‘My Somnambulant Heart’, the story that gives the collection its title.  Though barely acknowledged until a chance encounter at a mutual’s friend’s garden party, uncomfortable memories surface in Baxter, when he hears a familiar voice on the radio, and remembers the part he had played in tormenting the oddball John Harris — described as “a leper bar the disease.” Even before their reacquaintance, Baxter, newly relocated from London to a bigger house in the Surrey countryside, is aware of reinventing himself to fit his new surroundings. The irony isn’t lost on him: surveying the unfamiliar scale of his new life, he thinks, “Space. My final frontier.” Later, in an imagined piece of roleplay, he pictures himself forcibly kissing his married neighbour, Samantha, envisaging that such an act will eventually lead to the ultimate act of acceptance, when, “Perhaps a year later, one afternoon when Roger was playing Golf, she would let me have her over the dining room table.” Such grimly comic moments recur throughout the collection, and their function isn’t relief so much as exposure — throwing light on the darker truths Hook’s characters conceal from themselves. Meeting Harris again exposes not just Baxter’s guilt, but the vacuity of the life he’s built. 

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The remaining stories are no less accomplished. ‘Something to Believe In’ is a moving account of self-delusion and missed chances, as two friends trade memories of relationships that might have been, each still quietly blaming someone else for what life withheld. In ‘All That Dead Beauty’, Blake, named for the poet, tries to recreate the pastoral landscape of his youth inside his city home, and inadvertently conjures woodwose — mischievous creatures of myth — into being. In ‘Blanche’, covert recordings of live musical performances curdle into enactments of barbaric cruelty that expose the protagonist's own desperate need for connection. ‘Keepers’ follows Juska, who inherits an abandoned lighthouse and recruits three other women to help restore it, a quixotic gesture that plays more as performance art than renovation — until the process reveals itself as ritual, building toward something dark and cosmic. ‘Water in the Wrong Light’carries an echo of Don’t Look Now in its writer-protagonist’s premonition of his own death, while ‘Sundowning’ is a shattering tale of love, loss and guilt, bookended by an act of sexual violence and a heartbreaking moment of recognition. An imagined brother haunts ‘Inversion Layer’, and in the playfully unnerving ‘An Absence of Ghosts’, the pretensions of its four characters are softened by their own misunderstandings and missed cues. 

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What unites these seventeen stories, beyond Hook’s restless range of register, is a recurring fascination with art and image-making as sites of danger — photographs, sculptures, tableaux, recordings, all of them thresholds through which his characters lose some portion of themselves. And running beneath that is an abiding interest in identity under pressure: people reinventing, dissolving, or being quietly erased by what they’ve made or witnessed. Hook is never disparaging of them. Whatever their weaknesses and self-delusions, he writes with real empathy and understanding, as though their missteps were his own — and, by extension, ours. Somnambulant Hearts is a generous, unsettling, quietly devastating collection, and one of the strongest cases yet for Hook as one of the most interesting writers working in the space between horror and the literary.

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Mike O’Driscoll, July 2026

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