Jacob Rollinson is an English librarian and writer who has completed a creative and critical writing PhD at the University of East Anglia. His work has appeared in Spoonfeed, Moxy, Critical Quarterly , and the Brixton Review of Books. In 2021, he released his novella, Late King in Yellow Wood.
Now, his debut novel, The Truth of Carcosa, has been published. An homage to The King in Yellow, the book follows evil books, shadowy corporations, and interdimensional monsters as they collide in a metafictional and horrific tale of corruption and power.
We asked Rollinson to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped his life and influenced his writing.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
When I was a child, there seemed to be a vogue in Britain for fantasy featuring anthropomorphic animals—possibly thanks to Richard Adams’s Watership Down. I was into it. In fact, I found stories with human characters suspect and difficult. I loved Brian Jacques’s Redwall series. Then I discovered Robin Jarvis’s The Deptford Mice series, which had a decidedly darker tone. Likeable characters got killed horribly, lovers were thwarted by fate and tradition, and there was no sense of justice in the world: the vulnerable were prey to the cruel. The Oaken Throne concluded with a Shakespearean suicide. I read it twice, absolutely enchanted by the melodrama. (For the record, Watership Down remains unmatched and was foundational for me, but this question was about obsession, not quality.)
What book helped you through puberty?
I feel like this question is probably about developing emotional intelligence, and very few of the books I read in my early adolescence did that for me. I switched quite quickly from children’s books to adult ones, which typically required a level of maturity I didn’t really have yet (I remember earnestly reading my copy of Primo Levi’s Auschwitz memoir If this is a Man during a French exchange trip at the age of 13). Kurt Vonnegut’s books helped me accommodate Big Scary Ideas which were becoming real to me at that age, especially Slaughterhouse–Five, Mother Night, and The Sirens of Titan.
What book do you wish 18-year-old you had read?
My mother was always trying to get me to read Ursula Le Guin when I was young, and I was highly resistant. I do wish I’d listened to her. It took me until my late thirties before I read the Earthsea quartet, to my shame. It would have done me a great deal of good—moral, stylistic, emotional—to start with A Wizard of Earthsea at eighteen.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire. This book electrified me when I first encountered it and remains a massive inspiration. It’s skillful and playful and intelligent at every level, from the overarching structure to each individual sentence, every carefully chosen word. It’s so good as to be positively discouraging; I had a boss who advised me, once: ‘read Nabokov, and despair’.
Virginia Woolfe, Mrs Dalloway. It’s a beautiful example of language being molded to represent the life of the mind and the senses, while still maintaining narrative coherence. An aspiring writer should read at least a couple of modernists.
Hillary Mantel, Wolf Hall. All three books in the series are instructive. Mantel’s dialogue feels urgent and accessible without being intrusively ‘modern’. Her ability to deliver masses of complex historical detail concisely and grippingly was very impressive. She gave an unflinching sense of Zeitgeist that included injustice, violence and fear, exquisite craft and beauty, and moments of transcendence.
Michael Ondaatje, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. This is a verse novel that radically reimagines one of the myths of the Old West. A demonstration of what you can do with vignettes, images, moments, and space. Aspiring writers should read poetry, at least for a little while.
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
The Truth of Carcosa is an homage to Robert W. Chambers’s 1895 novel The King in Yellow. My novel started in 2020 as a series of essays about that book, written in an arch, pseudo-academic style (Pale Fire was an inspiration). As I wrote my essays, a certain voice started to emerge, that of an alienated outsider, educated but unbalanced. At one stage I became sick with COVID-19, which resulted in a high fever, and afterwards I used writing to process my fever dreams; the perspective became more paranoid, the insights more deranged. It became apparent that I was writing a novel, and I needed to create a world in which my narrator’s deranged ramblings could take place. Everything was built from there.
Roberto Bolaño, 2666. This book operates by a kind of dream logic and integrates elements of the (horrific) fantastic but deals with very real issues of femicide and the influence and impact of fascism. One central conceit of the book, that of a fictional author with an outsized legacy that fascinates (literary) detectives, is transposed into The Truth of Carcosa. The novel’s many other signposts to Bolaño’s work (and life) are not subtle—it was my intention to show his influence, not hide it.
Kazuo Ishiguro, When We Were Orphans. I have loved lots of Ishiguro’s books (especially Never Let Me Go), but strangely it was a sequence in this otherwise less impactful novel that recurred in my mind while I was writing The Truth of Carcosa. It’s the dream-like sequence where the narrator visits a Chinese city under siege by the occupying Japanese army during World War II. Ishiguro has made more experimental use of dream sequences (The Unconsoled) but here it was written in service of, and to enhance, the plot. This was an effect I consciously wanted to emulate.
What books are on your nightstand now?
Patrick O’Brian, The Thirteen Gun Salute. Last year for my birthday I received the first twelve books in O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin series (adventure books from the Age of Sail). This year for Christmas I got the last eight. I have to ration them out because I can read each book in a couple of days and they are wonderful.
Eliza Clark, Penance. I really enjoyed Clark’s Boy Parts, which felt like a contemporary response to American Psycho but was also very much its own thing.
Plastiboo, Vermis I: Lost Dungeons and Forbidden Woods. Inspired by dungeon crawler games and retro digital graphics, Vermis is a guide to a game that doesn’t exist. I draw a lot of inspiration from visual arts and music, and I like to dip into this non-narrative art book before going to sleep.
Eugene Thacker, Horror of Philosophy, Vols 1-3. Another birthday present. I’ve been wanting to read it for a while and I hope it lives up to my expectations.