First of all… how refreshing to have a book idea that seems new and never done before. This was such an intriguing and mind boggling read but in all the best ways. Quirky and so well executed; the effort that went into making this book believable is amazing and as a result the finished work… epic. The slow build tension kept me on the edge of my seat and like Alex and Jay’s quest for the Helmsman’s clues and chapters I kept going back for more. Equal parts creepy, unique and intense. What a read!

Sadly this was a DNF for me. I couldn't get on with the narrator's voice and often found myself lost in the terminology. I'm sure others will enjoy it, but not for me, sorry.

Thank you so much to Titan books and NetGalley for the ARC!

3 stars!

I have been battling with the rating for this since finishing it and it was a tough one because it's written really well and with so much information and research went into this, it was truly impressive.

It really gave me a digital House of Leaves vibe but within the tech, hacking, ARG world! I loved the use of media within it and it really did grasp my attention to keep reading. Sadly I just didn't love this as much as I had hoped BUT I have to give credit to how well this is written it just wasn't a perfect read for me but that doesn't mean it's not for anyone else.

I can't wait to see what else Matt Wixey will write!

I've long dreamed of finding a novel that has the playful, interactive quality of gamebooks I loved in my childhood, such as Kjartan Poskitt's Find the Phantom of Ghastly Castle (it only took me 20 years to find the bloody phantom, but I DID IT!) plus the delightful innovation of the best of r/nosleep (e.g. the Stairs in the Woods stories) where readers' comments play along with the fiction and feed into the next instalment. However, I had pretty much decided it wasn't possible, because novels that try to engage with these forms tend to feel gimmicky or try-hard - and obviously enough, not interactive. Then I read Matt Wixey's Basilisk. What a reading experience! This novel follows an ethical hacker who starts working through an online series of puzzles set by the mysterious figure of The Helmsman, who claims that if you solve them all, you will be presented with his basilisk, a cognitive weapon that consists of just four words. If you read them, they will shatter your perception of reality and may drive the unprepared mad. Indeed, most of the people who have seen the basilisk are now dead.

I absolutely adore this kind of Lovecraftian premise - knowledge as horror - and Wixey handles it brilliantly. Along the way, we learn a lot about the dangers that can lurk inside your own brain, from 'philosophical zombie' thought experiments that challenge the reality of sensory experience to linguistic explorations of 'depth-charge sentences' that deliberately mislead. But how the hell was Wixey going to pull off the ending? Would he try and give us an inevitably disappointing basilisk - or cop out? Obviously, I'm not going to spoil it, but I think one of the most impressive things about Basilisk is how it handles the reader's emotions. As I neared the end of the novel, I shared the characters' desperation to know the answer, but was also starting to wonder what it is about humanity that makes us want to know at all costs, even if we're pretty certain the consequences will be horrendous. And as I turned the final pages, I was becoming properly apprehensive... should I maybe just put the book down? This is both a superb horror novel (the Fairlop Waters sequence is unforgettable) and a satisfyingly brainy tour through hacking, philosophy, linguistics, computer science and more. Fantastic.

Basilisk is hard to describe. It’s almost like a techno-thriller horror novel but could also be considered just horror or thriller. All I know is despite whatever genre this may be it had me hooked from the start. I loved the pop culture references, I loved the horror aspects, the thriller and tech parts. It did give me slight Hackers (1995) vibes which is always a good thing.
I loved how this novel not only deals with horror on a surface level but you get to see the horror of the characters as their obsessions grow with solving the puzzle. There is a lot of tension in this one as well which only makes it that much better.
If you enjoy cyber thrillers, horror and tightly woven plots this is one for you.
As always thank you to Titan Books for the advanced copy to review, my reviews are always honest and freely given.

Basilisk was a terrifying slow descent into madness that you cannot pull yourself away from. It is insidious and unforgettable.

This was such a well-written book that effectively conveys that creeping dread that slowly consumes you. It is brilliantly delivered horror that delves into timely topics. You cannot help but get pulled in and want to follow the characters down the rabbit hole. This was a twisted look at Internet rabbit holes and conspiracy theories – a puzzle box of death and destruction. It speaks to that innate desire to crack the code, to be the one who finds the truth. We all want to know everything and this plays on that endless quest for knowledge. There are certain sequences in this that still give me shivers. Wixey deftly creates this atmosphere of paranoia and delusion where you are constantly questioning what is real and what is fantasy, particularly filtered through these various sources and unreliable narrative voices. You have to put the jigsaw pieces together yourself, though you are handed several parts throughout. It builds to a fantastic conclusion. The reading experience is definitely fractured but the culmination of it all is well worth the journey.

You follow Alex and Jay, before and after a devastating event occurs. They are two hackers - colleagues turned into fellow hunters when an especially odd occurrence appears during a job. Their spiral exposes so much of their messiness and makes them feel that much more authentic because you can identify with aspects of their quest. We have all had that one thing we just had to chase and this is it for them. As they get pulled further into this labyrinth, it becomes evident that there are larger forces at play. In the present day, there is a wonderful story about grief and guilt being told, even as it becomes enmeshed in those fateful events.

Basilisk is the type of story that burrows into your brain and will not leave. It is impactful, timely and imaginative horror.

💭 #QOTD  if you found a hidden game, promising to reveal pretty things and wonderful secrets, would you play it?

Title: Basilisk
Author: Matt Wixey
Pages: 560
Rating: 3/5
Spice/Romance level: 🩷 talk of a relationship but no real romance
#Arc eCopy ( #gifted ) - review left voluntarily
UK re-publish date - 1st July 2025

"Their only crime was curiosity"

A cyber horror about a game that spreads a deadly virus that drives people crazy!

It gave me the black mirror vibe of play thing and I couldn't put it down.

So much research had gone into this. With psychological and social reports, technical terminology, teasing, twists and memorable villains. It reminded me of we happy few with the censored people "Be Happy!" It was incredibly well written.

This book is heavy on terminology. It was a hard read in some places, but it had me hooked. I was definitely curious. I wanted to know the words. I wanted to know the secret. I wanted to know if I'd pass the game.


You'll love this book if you like
- Hacker and cyber worlds
- unreliable narrators
- ARG
- games and puzzles
- psychological mind games
- sci fi horror thriller
- social experiments
- books over 500 pages

First of all, this is a hugely impressive piece of work. So much has gone into this and it shows a writer capable of some many different styles - narrative, scientific papers, weird fiction, plays, 'found' footage...it's all here and all comes together in a way that works. There is a lot of content but, once you're invested in this story, you'll be wanting to devour every single word.

This one did take me a while to get into, I'll admit that. The opening was good, but not particularly horror-centric. However, like the game at the heart of this story, it intrigued me enough to get its claws into my brain, and before I knew it I was fully in.

I'm probably not the primary audience for this - I'm not a hacker, I'm massively into games or puzzles either, but I am a horror fan and the more this story went on, the more there was to satisfy that particular itch. All of the contents of the Helmsman's Texts, which form the basis of the game that our main character Alex has found herself playing, were super unnerving. But the darkest moments came from those weird, smiling but not-quite-right-or-normal folk who keep turning up and trying to convince Alex to stop playing, with increasingly terrifying methods.

I also enjoyed the 'found' style of this, with the story being presented as something that really happened and that had been forwarded to the author because he works in cybersecurity. The whole piece is annotated with notes from someone who works for the police, and poses even more questions than the story does on its own. Even though you know you're reading fiction - or, you assume it is fiction! - the way it pulls from the real world of shady online doings, the addition of the footnotes and chapters of the game itself...it feels like you're getting a glimpse at something you shouldn't, something that feels unsettling and dangerous.

The full piece is fascinating. We learn about the lore of the game that Alex is playing, we learn what has happened to other people who have completed it - spoiler, not good things! - and we also learn about the mechanics and motivation of the game itself. The more of the game we see Alex and her colleague Jay complete, the more invested we become as a reader...which makes the climax particular effective as things fall apart and we race headlong to that final chapter of the Helmsman's Texts that we've been straining for the whole time.

I've seen a few comparisons to House of Leaves. I can't commit directly having never read HOL, but looking at summaries online I can understand where those comps are coming from. Maybe I'll have to give that a go some time!

For a book that, on the face of it, is about hacking it pulls in so much; uncanny valley, online culture, the dark web, MKultra, and loads more weird stuff besides. It's ambitious, engaging and very much worth the effort needed to wade through everything that is offered here. While it isn't the most outright horrific thing I've read this year, it won't leave me alone. If I think about it too much my paranoia levels creep up and I have an urge to disconnect entirely from anything digital. To me, that suggests an effective story!

Thanks so much to the publishers and to NetGalley for the review copy.

Wow! This book was totally engrossing and simultaneously nerve wracking! I read an eARC of this book on Net Galley so thank you to the author and the publisher.

I couldn’t put this one down. It’s such an unnerving book. We follow a person working in cyber security as they get drawn into a mysterious game that puts them in real danger. While working at a job with their mentor, they receive a strange message that has them solving a coding puzzle from someone called The Helmsman. They and their mentor quickly become obsessed with solving the full puzzle. But as they learn more they start to get warnings from people that the game is not as they seem and pursuing this path can only lead to danger and misery.

The deeper the characters got into this, the more terrified I became for them. Their obsession with solving this leads them to put themselves in danger, make poor choices and sacrifice their personal lives and health and sanity. There was a real and pervasive sense of jeopardy for the characters throughout. The tension in this book was immense!

This book is written in a multimedia format so we have a narrative from the main character interspersed with fragments from the game, notes from an investigator, even little plays. There is a lot of technical language used but it is footnoted with explanations.

I’d recommend this for fans of books like Ready Player One, Rabbits, Night Film or Blake Crouch. I was completely gripped throughout and I really enjoyed this book.

I want to start this by saying that I'm obsessed with this cover. The story, however, was nothing like I was expecting. I didn't expect it to be one fo those mixed media (?) books in terms of how the story was told. Usually I find them fun, but this time around, I found it so hard to follow and keep interest, which is a shame because the story overall is good. It just took me so long to get through it!

Very fun Ligottian cyberpunk. Excellent, morally ambiguous characters that have you thinking but rooting for them. And a good writing style

*4.5 stars
Basilisk by Matt Wixey is a horror novel set to be published by Titan Books on July 1st 2025.

Hello Friend!

Where to begin describing this book?

On paper (and the publisher's description) it follows ethical hacker Alex Webster as she and her friend Jay Morton investigate The Helmsman and his texts, believing it to be an ARG after a breach in the IT systems of the company they are contracting for.

In practice, however, the novel is more like Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves or Dracula with a technological twist. Meta, unflinching and told through accounts of events and not told in a conventional way, this “genre”/approach is one of my absolute favourites and one I myself have used. And let me tell you, it's a bloody hard one. Wixey thrives within these constraints, and makes texts which could have been dull interesting, especially when they are full of technical jargon about hacking and science and are hard to understand. I never felt like my lack of knowledge in these subject areas stopped my enjoyment of the story, in fact it enhanced it.

We are effectively on this journey with Alex, even if retroactively, and we receive each new chapter of The Helmsman's Texts (THT) at the same point in the story's chronology as she does, following police officer Holly Soames’ footnotes as she analyses the ‘WEBSTER’ manuscript

A highlight for me is Lovesickness, a possibly fictional, possibly not short play featured in The Helmsman's Texts, purportedly written by a playwright called Marlow Tannhauser. It stands out amongst the pieces for me because of its darkness, and Wixey’s cleverness with words.

My favourite character would probably have to be Eoin, as the sweet and perfectly matched non-hacker boyfriend of Jay. The scenes where the couple invited Alex to their home in hopes of solving the various puzzles to unlock more chapters of THT are beautifully written and bittersweet. But then I am a sucker for sweet, queer Irish people, even if they do break down bathroom doors to stop people sending emails.

While I'm not an expert on hacking or films/stories about it, but my perception of them is flashy, American affairs like WarGames and Hackers but Basilisk feels so distinctly British and I don't think there are enough distinctly British stories in this way.

Wixey himself has worked in the cyber security industry for many years and this really shows in the knowledge and expertise Jay and Alex have, as well as the anecdotes and references to various aspects of pop culture.

Basilisk is definitely a must-read for fans of hacking stories, ARGs, and things like creepypasta and the Backrooms, much like House of Leaves. Horror fans will also love it, as will fans of Person of Interest and possibly The Good Place due to its interesting approach to philosophical questions. Wixey’s prose is unflinching and his characters brilliantly written and I can't wait to see if he has any other stories in the pipeline.

Basilisk is a horror novel about an online game that leads two ethical hackers down a road towards a mysterious cyber weapon for targeting people, not technology. Alexandra Webster worked for a cybersecurity firm, and now we're reading her story, written down to document what happened when her and her colleague Jay found the start of an online game created by 'The Helmsman' that rewarded participants with further "chapters" about a mysterious weapon. Jay disappeared, and Alex was still searching for what happened to him, and who the Helmsman was, whilst evading the strange smiling people trying to stop her.

This is a very distinctively-told horror novel, most easily summarised by saying it is like if you tried to do House of Leaves about a tech-focused ARG rather than a house. The actual writing is partly a narrative written by the ostensible protagonist, Alex, with added comments by someone else investigating the manuscript, and also the texts of the Helmsman's chapters. On top of that, there's links to articles, videos, and playlists, and a general expectation that you get drawn into the mystery enough to want to know what is going on. In that way, it makes you a player too, even if a passive one, and that is perhaps how it is most like an ARG as well as being about one: the meta- and intertextuality make it a horror novel with a 'this is true document we found' framing that actually has that creepy sense that could be true. Alex as a character isn't particularly transparent—in her narrative she barely reveals anything about herself that isn't part of what happened—but this works to allow the reader into the position of Alex, or to project their own things onto her. In a way, this is a book that is more about avatars than actual people.

Despite not being a hacker or a cybersecurity person, I'm otherwise perhaps the target audience for this novel: I love horror and internet horror, I find the concept of ARGs fascinating, I work close enough to tech-y stuff that I can recognise some of the tech terminology and don't find the rest of it intimidating if I don't understand it (and, I love mentioning 'The Game' as an example of a game). Like House of Leaves, there is a lot contained within this novel (or linked from it), including the hacker stuff, but also Old English, The Matrix, cryptic crosswords, philosophy, creepypastas, and other things that all feel part of a certain milieu. However, if you're not really engaged with those as potential ideas that might fit together in some kind of weird way, this book might feel off-putting, rather than a fun sort of rabbit hole. For me, it was the latter, a story packed with references to things I knew a bit about and an atmospheric sense of dread as it slowly unfolds through Alex's narrative.

There's something about modern day fears captured in Basilisk even though it might appear to be a fairly silly horror concept, from the idea that there's some kind of cyber weapon that could actually cause people to go insane as in the book, to other technological thought experiments and conspiracy theories that can cause people to extreme actions. The book itself has sections in The Helmsman's chapters that discuss some of these things, such as Roko's Basilisk and Slender Man, and being aware of some of the very real possible consequences of online ideas makes Basilisk even scarier in some ways. Again, this does require some knowledge of these things already (for example, I think the Zizian cult stuff around Roko's Basilisk is too recent to even be mentioned in the discussion of Roko's Basilisk in this novel), but even just knowing that ideas on the internet can become something more primes you. In this way, the book is also similar to something like Alison Rumfitt's Brainwyrms, another horror novel that takes the internet seriously.

From seeing some early reviews before I started reading, I expected Basilisk to be difficult to read and impenetrable (ironic given that Alex and Jay are penetration testers), but it turned out to be a readable, slow burn descent into what is apparently a purposeful madness. Maybe I'm just really the right person for this book, but I had a great time with it, and if you have any interest in the intersection between horror and technology, especially in terms of the transmission of the horror 'threat', then Basilisk is fun, dark, and has a satisfying enough ending despite feeling like a book that could perhaps never end in a way that really brings it all together.

This one sounded full of promise of something different for horror, however I found this quite hard going.
It's a long read and you need to be dedicated. I found it hard with all the jargon and out of my depth. It's an interesting read but I didn't find it too scary.

Basilisk by Matt Wixey is a dark and atmospheric thriller that blends cybercrime with psychological horror in an inventive way. The premise is original and immediately gripping, diving into a world of high-tech fear and eerie suspense. Wixey’s writing is crisp, and the tension builds steadily across a cleverly structured narrative.

The characters are intriguing, particularly the protagonist, though at times their development feels secondary to the plot’s momentum. The techno-thriller elements are well-executed, but some of the denser explanations can briefly slow the pace. Still, the novel explores compelling themes around surveillance, control, and identity, giving the story a strong thematic core.

The ending delivers a solid payoff, tying together the mystery with a satisfying, if slightly abrupt, conclusion. Basilisk is a smart and gripping debut with a unique edge—an enjoyable 3.5-star read for fans of thrillers with a technological twist.

I did DNF this at 6% but i dont think its a bad book. This book is extremely technical and has subject specific terminology which covered areas such as coding, hacking and computing that i simply dont specialise in or understand.

For those who do understand this area i think this is a must read, and its a unique way of presenting horror. Read digitally it can be super immersive as it has all the relevant links, from a playlist, to websites and articles referenced throughout it.