'Glitterland' is the Alexis Hall book that proves romance doesn't have to play nice

The pulp crime writer, the Essex boy and the Alexis Hall book that started it all

I found Alexis Hall the way half of BookTok did: through ‘Boyfriend Material’, recommended by a stranger on TikTok somewhere in the fog of a Covid lockdown.

That book led me to ‘Glitterland’, the first in Hall’s Spires series, and it’s where my fandom really took hold.

Published in 2013, ‘Glitterland’ introduces Ash Winters. Once a golden boy, now a clinically depressed, cynical writer of bestselling pulp crime fiction under the pen name A.A. Winters.

Ash is drawn into the orbit of Darian Taylor, a flamboyant, endlessly cheerful Essex boy chasing a reality TV break, and the class and temperament gap between them becomes the engine of the whole book.

Romance runs on formula, and I don’t say that as a criticism: I love a formula done well.

What I love about Hall’s writing is how he uses that formula, then refuses to let it stay comfortable.

Without spoiling it, the moment this relationship is put in jeopardy is one of the most heartbreaking, almost cringe-inducing scenes I’ve read in years. I could imagine so brashly making a similar comment and being mortified. It’s written so precisely.

Ash is a character I connect with more than I expected to.

That said, I don’t write crime fiction, but there’s something about a person who used to be seen as golden, now quietly falling apart behind a byline, that I recognised in him.

The new edition of ‘Glitterland’ includes a genuine bonus: a full chapter of ‘The Glass Menagerie’, the in-universe crime novel Ash writes as A.A. Winters.

It’s a clever bit of world-building, and my only complaint is that Hall only gave us the one chapter. I would love to read the whole thing.

‘Glitterland’ was a finalist for the 2014 Lambda Literary Award, and more than a decade on, it still reads like the blueprint for everything Hall does best: prickly, wounded men, sharp class commentary, and a love story that earns its ending rather than assuming it.

It’s book one of four in the Spires series, available in paperback and ebook, and if you’re planning to read them in order, as I did, this is where to start.

READ MORE: Edwin and Marius pick up the heartbreak in ‘Waiting for the Flood’