GENRE-BENDING, SELF-REPLICATING HYBRIDS
Hard 8: Mobland, Buzz's Golf Skills, Aaron Draplin, Orpheus Nine
🧌 HYBRID EVERYTHING
We’re moving into a cultural phase where the easiest pitches and the biggest successes increasingly involve hybridisation.
This is newer than it sounds. Traditional thinking was that hybridisation destroys attention. The Venn Diagram of two excellent things is where a tiny audience for only both things congregates.
In 2021, my novel The Spiral—a hybrid of game-book fantasy and psychological thriller—went straight down that portal to hell.
But in 2025, I’m looking around at:
A creator grossing $3 million a year selling a horror story via physical letters.
A massive TV series drawn from a computer game, rather than the other way around.
Harmony Korine’s ungodly merger of cut-scene aesthetics, AI, and experimental film.
Huge Kickstarter successes for deluxe novels with tiered, bundled offerings.
Encroaching AI tools, absorbing hybridity like positive feedback: first, it makes a picture, then it animates it, and then...
All of this stuff is getting attention for what it is, rather than the big push. People are interested.
What do we want?
A: Niched-down, genre-bending, self-replicating, hybridised everything.
💵 MOBLAND
Mobland (on Paramount+) is not a hybrid.
It’s about as sturdy as a gangster story can get. The cast is impeccable (Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan, Helen Mirren and Paddy Considine and Joanne Froggatt), and Guy Ritchie directs the first couple of episodes with workmanlike restraint.
This is all in aid of putting millions of dollars on the screen behind a very, very grim story. I’m into it. Mobland is aiming for genre classic rather than innovative upstart, which is risky now.
🧢 AARON DRAPLIN
I’m on a bit of a graphic design bender lately and recently came away from the library with a copy of Draplin Design Co. Pretty Much Everything. I’ve always admired his stuff and we share a lot of ideas about design (my former bandmates know this better than most; my first piece of feedback for any album cover was always, ‘Show me how this becomes a t-shirt’).
The book is delightful. I mean, look at this beautiful spread of organised things:
⛳ BUZZ FROM THE MELVINS HAS A GOLF HANDICAP OF ‘8 OR 9’
Regular readers of this newsletter know that Buzz Osborne of the Melvins is one of my favourite people. One of the best musicians of his generation, a true iconoclast and contrarian, and now it seems: master golfer.
🤯 ORPHEUS NINE BY CHRIS FLYNN
Positioned as literary sci-fi, Flynn’s 4th novel is, on the surface, about exploding children. At a particular time, on a particular day, all the 9 years olds on Earth swell up and die. The book is about the aftermath.
Now I have a child this age, so I wasn’t rushing out to read this. I figured, this shit is triggering for me, but Chris is a friend and I loved his previous work, so I knew I was in safe hands.
I’m happy to report that Orpheus Nine isn’t some grotesque dystopia to be endured. Quite the opposite. It’s a deeply felt examination of the COVID-19 moment, drilling down into the absolute marrow of the pandemic to that horrible feeling of something inexplicable and pointless erasing the future.
📕 CURRENTLY READING
I’ve got a few things on the boil: I’m revisiting Will Christopher Baer’s Kiss Me, Judas — peak 90s neo-noir in every way. It’s not quite hitting like it used to, but there is still something fascinating about it. I’ll write more when I’m done.
I also have my head in Hey You Assholes by Kyle Seibel (intense, like being shot with arrows). Just read this story and if you like it, you’ll love this collection.
🧟 COLD FRONT (Short Story)
From last week’s newsletter:
It was all very cold and stark and anonymous. And that was also how those things made you feel when they were up close. When a pack of them came through. They raided the campus from time to time and it was as if it an invisible frost had settled. You could almost feel it was about to happen. As dusk came and night fell, it was right there, that feeling of being out in the open when a cold front rolled through.
— IAIN
