Joey Batey’s It’s Not a Cult is a fiercely original debut that blends horror, folk music, and the dark side of online fandom into a gripping and unexpectedly lyrical novel. Centered on a struggling Northern English folk band whose music about obscure deities “the Solkats” gains sudden traction on social media, this story spirals into an eerie exploration of cultism, interpretation, and the loss of artistic control.

What begins as a tale of creative misfits playing esoteric songs in dingy pubs soon escalates into something far more sinister. Their fanbase explodes, and with it comes a wave of increasingly unhinged interpretations of their work. As the lines blur between admiration and obsession, the band watches helplessly as their songs fuel a movement where dissent is punished and the original meaning becomes irrelevant. The creeping horror lies in this slow transformation from fandom to fanaticism.

Told largely through the perspective of Al, the band's emotionally detached drummer and archivist, the narrative gains a unique tone. Al’s internal monologue, always slightly removed and filtered through the lens of a camera, adds both intimacy and distance which is fitting for a character who struggles to connect outside the frame. This narrative choice reinforces the novel’s themes of mediation, distortion, and how art (and people) are perceived.

Batey’s prose is striking. While the plot delivers all the thrills and tension one expects from a horror novel, it’s the moments of poetic clarity that truly elevate the book. Some passages are so vividly and beautifully written that they demand a pause.

Character-wise, the dynamics are sharp and compelling. The core bandmates clash in delightful ways, each representing creative extremes that balance and provoke one another. Their “promoter,” full of regional quirks and an instantly vivid voice, adds color and humor, even as the story darkens. That said, some regional dialects might be a challenge for non-UK readers but that realism only enriches the atmosphere.

One of the most compelling aspects of It’s Not a Cult is its ambiguity. Are the Solkats real? Is this mass hysteria, or something supernatural forcing its way into the world through song? Batey doesn’t give easy answers, and that restraint adds weight to the story. The unease lingers.

This is a novel about what happens when creation leaves the hands of its creators, about how stories can grow legs - and teeth - once they hit the internet. It’s about how meaning is mangled by virality, how myth can be weaponized, and how even love for something can curdle into something monstrous.

As a debut, It’s Not a Cult is confident, strange, and immensely readable. It’s thrilling in its originality, unnerving in its insight, and frequently beautiful in its language. A must read for fans of literary horror, folkloric weirdness, or stories that take a scalpel to modern digital culture.

A thoroughly good time. I read an eARC of this book on NetGalley so thank you to the author and the publisher.

This was an entertaining horror novel focused around music, cults and social media. While I was expecting an entertaining and menacing read, what I hadn’t expected was how beautiful some of the language would be. There were descriptive moments so evocative and incisive that I had to pause to ponder them. That’s not even mentioning the riveting ‘cycles’ of songs peppered throughout the book telling the tales of the Solkats which were beautiful and boisterous in their own right. This book is memorable for its entertaining story, its discussion on social media, but particularly for the wonderful descriptions and language.

We follow a not so popular band, playing their folkloric cycles in small pubs in the North of England whose lives are changed when they start to get attention on social media. This exposes them to hundreds of thousands of new followers who interpret their songs in increasingly menacing ways, ways that start to gain a following where those who dissent are punished. This is both attractive and worrying to the band and their ‘archivist’ drummer Al who documents their journey through video.

The growing, creeping menace of the followers is tangible as the band starts to lose control of their own message and see their work reinterpreted to feed the malicious intentions of others. There’s an insidious spreading through the consciousness of the followers where it no longer matters what the vision of the creator was, and this leads to devastating and escalating consequences.

This book felt really exciting, for the language as mentioned but also for feeling like something new and different. It was often unexpected, little surprises coming out of nowhere that make you challenge your own preconceptions. A riveting and thoughtful read.