Joey Batey’s debut novel, It’s Not a Cult, a Northumbrian folk horror with music at its core, has been pitched as Daisy Jones & The Six (2019) meets Yellowjackets (2021-). The novel’s unnamed band comprises Callum, the band’s myth-making singer-songwriter; Melusine (Mel), the magnetic frontwoman who rarely sheds her theatrical air; and Al, the drummer and reluctant PR specialist. They thrive in obscurity until an act of violence launches them into stardom. Becoming viral sensations with a “cult” following begins as an unhinged enough experience yet continues to escalate, until the chaos of the concerts provokes increasingly brutal accidents, and the growing fandom develops a thirst for blood. As it turns out, being revered, worshipped, and heard is as much a triumph as a savage tragedy. [1]
Draped in the clothes of genre fiction, the novel speaks to artists about art, exploring the many facets of the pain and risk that comes with putting yourself “out there.” Batey, who has his own niche band, The Amazing Devil, and experienced a rise to fame through his role as Jaskier in Netflix’s The Witcher (2019-), brings a wealth of lived insight into the story, taking "write what you know" to unexpected heights. The novel explores complex themes—distortion of perception through mediation, existential loneliness, human nature, and the role of technology—and sees and unveils the uncanny in all of them. Readers expecting a traditional genre experience may be thrown off—but for those attuned to its wavelength, it’s a striking, generous, and at times exhilarating act of cultural resistance.
The band sings of a contemporary variation of pagan gods (Solkats), patrons of small things such as “texts at three in the morning,” “unheard jokes,” “red wine stains,” and “bus stop fights.” In a constant blending of the ancient and the young, the everyday and the sacred, these deities are exposed to the light of social media, merging two kinds of mad and maddening worship, equally mindless and wild, attracting “followers” in both the contemporary and religious sense. There’s something unsettling about this juxtaposition. It reveals the base, primitive nature of humanity, stripping people down to vulgar biology that lurks behind the mask of individuality, progress, and innovation. The novel explores the dangers of the herd mentality that can be constructed through online communities where people unite not only through shared interests and passions, but also through common misconceptions and misbeliefs. They form a threatening force through growing communal certainty, trapped within a confirmation loop. The novel’s horror lies not so much in its masked “cult” of fans enacting their violence as in alienation, dehumanization, and being lost between the lines.
At the centre of all this fear and anguish lies a question of influence, impact, and inspiration—the loss of control that comes with releasing one’s creation into the world and seeing it reflected in others. The novel asks what happens when adoration turns feral, and performance becomes sacrifice. Art is presented as something private that is violated by being exposed, yet also must be released. Only then, after all, can it conjure magical moments when the band steps onto the stage and achieves, as Alice describes it, “a seemingly ceaseless seraphic emanation of the self, a kind of flow through collective creation” (p. 74). But sharing carries a risk of contagion: Art, once freed, spreads and radiates, reshaped by misreadings, biases, and projections. The novel grieves this loss—of meaning, of authorship, of self as—the band experiences “the death of the author” while still breathing. In his elegy for W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden wrote that “The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living.” Today, through the grace of social media, one can witness oneself being devoured (a)live—being “scattered among a hundred cities,” “given over to unfamiliar affections” and spend one’s “last afternoon as himself,” learning how it feels to become one’s admirers. What begins as the story of a band that grew too “big” for its own good, then, becomes a dissection of how the digital age turns artistic life into a site of Gothic deterioration.
Privacy—its meaning, and its violation through scientific progress—also holds an intriguing place in the novel, harking back to the origins of the novel itself. The early novel helped to establish the value of a private thought, giving interior life shape and meaning through public narration. The protection of “the inside” or “the home,” however, is also a classic theme of Gothic horror: Victorian readers, invested in the sanctity of domestic spaces, were horrified by Dracula climbing exterior walls, entering through windows, shattering the cherished boundary between public and private life. In the hypermodern setting of It’s Not a Cult, that division has collapsed. The band’s every move is recorded, every thought broadcast, and personal reflections transformed into song. Everything they do becomes simultaneously private and public, engulfing them in an uncanny experience where the familiar is made strange through repetition, distortion, and visibility. The band hear discordant covers of their own music, have their words used against them, see themselves refracted in recordings, witness violence enacted in their name, and feel alienated from their own identity, their “true self caked in interpretation” (p. 201). The cost is high, but to relinquish their existence in the public eye is to silence their music.
It’s Not a Cult, then, is obsessed with mediation. Al (or Alice), the band’s “archivist” and our narrator, records her every waking minute, capturing the everyday lives of Callum and Mel as well as their performances. Viewing and re-viewing the footage, she gains new insights, blurring the distinction between representation and memory, until the recording becomes the experience: “I’ll know each frame, each lens flare, each misspoken word, each breath, by heart by the end” (p. 147). Hidden behind the camera, she only occasionally reaches for the intangible real and is enthralled, but also horrified by it—so much so that Callum and Mel recognise Al not being able to film as a kind of cruelty they want to protect her from. She uses the camera as one might use a mirror to reflect a basilisk—finding a direct view more deadly than the most unflattering distortions of representation.
If stories of growing up are about learning how to be “in the world and of the world,” Al’s is the opposite. As Alice Through the Looking Glass, she wanders a reversed universe—where what matters doesn’t matter and vice versa, yet people remain attracted to the glow of authenticity like moths, often without understanding what they crave. She notes how different the band’s performances feel live—the energy and charisma that enchant the fans, but that the lens fails to capture—and how awkward and stiff they appear in the recordings. This leads her to dwell on wider, philosophical gaps, falling between the idea and the reality, the motion and the act, leaving her suspended in a perpetual state of disconnection. [2]
In aesthetic terms, It’s Not a Cult is infatuated with the everyday and the mundane, and repelled by the polished, the manufactured, and the “special.” In rebellion against continuous mediation, it celebrates the physical and the affective, the direct and the unfiltered, the in-the-moment and the face-to-face, often collapsing into something akin to stream of consciousness: literary, impressionistic, and fragmentary. Batey reproduces sound with language, blending music, lyrics, screams, and noise, with rooms that “rumble into stomps and giggles and rummaging,” a song that “cavorts through the words, rising, ebbing, steadying, releasing, ricocheting,” and signing that “grinds a low rumble,” starts with “a low-pitched groan like cave-wind,” and stops with a sudden bang (pp. 83, 46, 85). He plays with rhythm, evokes textural richness, and sometimes verges on rhyme. Some of the novel’s most striking passages allow visuals to take centre stage, balancing vivid, tactile imagery with the grainy instability of a handheld camera.
The setting for all this is down and dirty—mostly urban—with rare but significant glimpses of nature. There’s an abundance of concerts in seedy pubs, cigarette smoke lit by the flashing lights of student parties, corner shops, and smudged makeup. Beauty exists only in its raw state: a reflection of sunlight in the rain, the united cheering of a crowd, a moment when Al sees past Mel’s performative excess and appreciates her unembellished charm, or observes Callum writing their music amongst scattered drafts. Borrowing from independent art, experimental film, and DIY culture, the novel embraces a loose, meandering style and a chaotic structure that favour a natural flow and reflect the impurities of subjectivity, blending sensory descriptions with snippets of conversations and clipped reflections. The form resists the neoliberal pursuit of a “perfect” product—one that gleams with the soulless sheen of airbrushed faces, and aspires to the status-quo-loving slickness of advertising and corporate filmmaking.
This aesthetic approach also challenges the romanticisation of artists, as well as the sanitisation and sensationalisation of relationships. The emotional bonds in the novel are fragile and unstable: The members of the band oscillate between closeness and distance, and Alice’s loving connection with her grandmother, however resilient, is interrupted by the wavering of her grandmother’s consciousness due to dementia. Despite admiring Mel and Callum—and seeing creating art with them as a source of meaning in her life—Alice never paints them as “divine” creative beings, but as flawed, complicated people. Their relationships are special not because they reflect some ideal of perfect harmony, but because they are strong, authentic, and beautifully rough around the edges. Affection is expressed through attention: the recognition of quirks, mannerisms, and half-formed feelings; the appreciation of another’s many facets and dimensions. The band’s mutual attunement defies easy interpretation and includes harsh judgements which linger but change nothing. Through this grounded, human portrayal of bandmates as friends rather than “distant” celebrities, the novel reaffirms the value of honesty and nuance, and highlights emotional complexity: At times connection seems impossible; at others it’s so self-evident, it needs no articulation.
These representations of relationships and the reception of art share a common thread: the importance of granting the benefit of the doubt, the recognition that each person contains something unknowable, and that respect demands acknowledging our ignorance instead of imposing our assumptions. David Levine and Alix Rule, in their discussion of the language of art criticism, claim that “refusing your designated position or label, or opting to shuffle through labels and positions as you like, is also to some extent a refusal of the rules of the art market.” [3] Slipping away from categorisation becomes both a defence of complexity and a strategy to evade control. Throughout the novel Al defies labels: fundamentally disinterested in herself, fluid in her personality, gender, and sexuality, she never settles into a “type” of a human. She simply is who she is. It is galvanising, as the novel proceeds, to see her move from hiding behind the camera to wielding it—watching others falter in the light of attention, exposed, judged, and changed by being flattened into an image. In her hands, the camera becomes a weapon—a realisation that toys with the possibility that it always had been.
As Al gains control, the band learns to use their performative powers—to attract, enthrall, but also to defend themselves when necessary. In the end, and despite all doubts, the novel—eclectic and definition-resistant in its own right—shows that it is possible to befuddle, to exist in the cracks between categorisations. Making art, it suggests, is creating meaning as much as being created by it.
Nevertheless, the novel often struggles—although it tries—to find humanity in the mess of media manipulation and animal instinct. Through its meandering flow of mediated experience, It’s Not a Cult conjures a feverish vision of a world slipping away from the people inhabiting it. Pushing against reductiveness of representation and the prevalence of alienation, commodification, and exploitation, it laments the consequences of knowing, as Oscar Wilde put it, “the cost of everything and the value of nothing.” And yet, it is also full of reluctant hope. Despite distortion and loss, something pure and indestructible persists. The destructive frenzy of pagan ritual indicates a spiritual hunger that can, in fact, be fed—with art, authenticity, and connection. Artifice either elevates itself and reaches the plane of performance, or is shed entirely, leading to honest creation—stronger and longer-lasting than the flesh. It’s Not a Cult lingers on glimpses of truth splintering the narrative, on open conversations interrupting loneliness, on direct experiences eclipsing the media buzz, on beauty surfacing from the mundane. Although the two opposing forces are in an ongoing battle, and there are no ultimate winners, there are brief, luminous moments of triumph. In many stunning passages, the novel reflects them: Mel playing with a child in the rain, Al and Callum finding a silent understanding, Al’s grandmother grasping onto lucidity. Seeing people be truly themselves is when the magic happens. Those who seek beauty find it. To again quote Wilde, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
In a recent Pitchfork review of Something Beautiful, Madison Bloom expresses frustration that, despite her ambition to create subversive work, Miley Cyrus rarely follows through on her desire to “explore new sounds.” Cyrus acknowledges that signing a contract means “setting [herself] up to become merchandise,” and expresses a wish: “At one point in my life, I look forward to just being an artist, untied, untethered. At some point I’ll get to do that.” It is striking to consider that someone with her success and resources still does not feel entitled to creative freedom. Commercial pressures, and their ability to stifle and repress, continue to define our cultural moment. It’s Not a Cult stands in defiance of this, criticising corporate cultural production and the shallow, attention-grabbing world of clicks and selfies. Anti-commodification, and anti-social media, it asks readers for depth, patience, and consideration—and in return offers an impassioned defence of artistic freedom, self-determination, and genuine human connection. This is the key to Batey’s achievement. He carves out space for authenticity within this hostile landscape. His resistance to the status quo—whether through this novel or his music—feels brave and contagious, a small proof that impossible odds don’t always spell defeat.
It’s Not a Cult invites readers to sink into its vision, to consider it fully—and through that, to de-normalise the priorities and flaws of the hypermodern experience, revealing how much of it has become “acceptable” only through weariness and habit. It is cathartic to hate what is hateful and mourn what is lost, to recognise how thoroughly one might acclimatise to unfavourable conditions to ease the constant anger at what cannot be changed. It’s Not a Cult thrives on contradictions: It asks for a response while decrying the very act of interpretation, defends its flaws by becoming a manifesto for imperfection, presents itself as commercial genre fiction despite being anything but, and longs for something better without daring to expect it. Yet, if change is possible, the process begins here—with questioning and unsettling.
Endnotes
[1] It’s worth noting that each person lost to the rolling madness of the band’s fandom—whether through accidents, direct attacks, or the slow erosion of their sanity—carries weight. There’s a value attached to life that includes the ability to exist as a full human being—and a recognition of the grief that follows the loss of that wholeness. This is itself refreshing and somehow defiant of genre conventions in thought-provoking ways. [return]
[2] See Auden, W. H. (1940) “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” in Another Time. New York: Random House (also online: https://poets.org/poem/memory-w-b-yeats). [return]
[3] See Levine, David and Rule, Alix (2013) “International Art English,” in Triple Canopy, 16, p. 40. Available at https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/international_art_english (accessed: 17 June 2025). [return]