"Basilisk" by Matt Wixey

Purporting to have been sent as an attachment to an anonymised email, the narrative is interspersed with comments from 'Holly Soames' who appears to be a law enforcement officer. The main story, told by protagonist Alex Webster, describes how she and her friend and colleague Jay Morton, both pentesters (computer hackers who are hired to seek out the vulnerabilities in a computer system in order that the hiring company can put safeguards into place), start playing a computer game in which they have to answer puzzles set by a shadowy character called The Helmsman; each puzzle solved is rewarded with a chapter of The Helmsman Texts - part autobiography, part philosophical treatise - the final chapter of which will be the basilisk, a cognitive hack which may drive a person insane.

The Helmsman Texts interrupt the novel narrative. To some extent it feels as if the purpose of the book was to present the philosophy in a way that a reader of horror, or speculative fiction, would tolerate. The first chapter considered Plato's Allegory of the Cave, the second described a cockroach invasion and discussed the possibilities of subliminal influencing, the fourth suggested that things such as religion and language could be considered a virus and the fifth promises the basilisk. We are never given the final chapter. The Texts include email chains, bibliographies, and playlets; the author has certainly been innovative. There's even a cryptic crossword (as a connoisseur I was a little disappointed in this). 

It's fundamentally an attempt to update the horror novel (“A long slow river leading to Kurtz.”; Ch 9) to the world of the internet. This was, for me, where it was weakest. The opposition, referred to only by a blanked out piece of text, were strange people with huge fixed smiles, half religious missionaries, half 'Men in black' clones. Their fundamental mission is for people to be happy which meant persuading them to stop playing the Helmsman's game, if necessary by killing them. Of course Alex and Jay, addicted to curiosity - rather like the teenagers in a horror film who, one by one, go down into the cellar - ignore the warnings. Much is made of the allegory of Eve plucking the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

The epigram is "ceci n'est pas un livre", French for 'this is not a book', a play on the famous Magritte painting of a pipe with the caption 'ceci n'est pas une pipe'. Presumably this is an example of the type of cognitive hack mentioned in the Helmsman Texts; the idea that if you can subvert a person's understanding of reality, you will drive them mad.

A book for someone who likes puzzles. Plot and style are much more important than character. It reminded me very much of another book which it quotes several times: Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hoftstadter.

I learned a great deal about hacking, including too many initials. I also realised, I think, why the Helmsman was called the Helmsman, something neither Jay not Alex seemed to fathom. The ancient Greek word for helmsman, or navigator, is κυβερνήτης, transliterated as kŭbernḗtēs, from which we derive the word 'cyber', cybernetics having been originally a science studying systems and their control.

Selected quotes:

• “On learning that we are being fucked, three questions present themselves: What am I being fucked by? Who is responsible for the fucking? And can I ameliorate the situation so that I am fucked as minimally as possible, and ideally not at all.” (Ch 1)
• “To be a hacker is to dance to hidden tunes ... It is to rewrite the song and repurpose the instruments. make a piano sound like a guitar; disguise a vuvuzela as a clarinet to get it past security; redesign a flute so that it produces the flatulent bellow of a tuba. All because we can.” (Ch 2)
• “There is precious little good fiction which concerns itself with hacking.” (Ch 4)
• “A significant amount of human effort ... is spent attempting to control the minds of others.” (The Helmsman Texts chapter 3)
• “The argument that religion is a virus has been made before ... It is often hereditary, but also transmitted through friends and acquaintances. It causes marked and bizarre changes in behaviour, including, but not limited to: changes in diet; an inability to consider certain things rationally; a sometimes fanatical adherence to arbitrary codes of morality; the mutilation of children's genitals; an irrational hatred of people infected by a slightly different strain; and, in its most extreme forms, violence, murder, and suicide.” (The Helmsman Texts chapter 3)
• “Convincing a person to cause significant harm to themselves or others is difficult ... Cassius uses astroturfing to convince Brutus to assassinate Caesar .... Lady Macbeth plays to Macbeth’s ambition to persuade him to kill Duncan ... Satan uses ‘perswasive words, impegn’d with Reason’ to convince Eve to consume the fruit of the tree of knowledge.” (The Helmsman Texts chapter 3)
• “Human behaviour can be drastically altered as a consequence of ingesting new knowledge.” (The Helmsman Texts chapter 3)
• “I find myself thinking whether there are ever glitches in reality, strange loops that repeat like records skipping forever. Little pockets of time that replay constantly while the world moves around them.” (Ch 7)
• “I've often thought that Otto is the human equivalent of vanilla - that if you cut him he would bleed beige, and it would congeal to look and smell like cold Ready Brek.” (Ch 7)
• “If we were to be arrested for our thoughtcrimes the overwhelming majority of the human race would be in handcuffs.” (Ch 7)
• “Thought experiments ... have changed the world, particularly in the field of physics (Einstein chasing a beam of light; Newton’s cannonball, etc)" (The Helmsman Texts chapter 4)
• “How we all fall! Slowly and then all at once!” (The Helmsman Texts chapter 5)
• “The world is a cacophony of noise, and deep underneath the waves is the occasional signal. Only a few penetrate. The world screams in your face, all the time, desperate for your attention and love!! Most of the time we give our attention to the things that scream the loudest.” (The Helmsman Texts chapter 5)

August 2025; 

Published in July 2025 by Titan Books, London

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God