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Model Actress Whatever
From the acclaimed critic and award-winning author of Anno Dracula comes a bitingly satirical story of superheroism, soap opera and alternative reality -- for readers of Austin Grossman's Soon I Will Be Invincible and George R.R. Martin's Wild Cards.
When Chrissie Chambers (model actress whatever) discovers her soap opera character is about to be killed off, she finally stops dieting and discovers hitherto untapped supernatural abilities. Meanwhile, Chrissie's aunt - former national heroine Lady Shade - goes missing. Afraid for Jasmine's safety and itching to costume-up, Chrissie and her ghost-possessed best friend Loulee break into Devil's Dyke, the asylum where Jasmine works as a therapist with the most dangerous cutthroats (supervillains) in Britain… only to find the inmates have taken over… Chrissie debuts successfully as a cloak (superheroine), but who will become the arch-nemesis of Lady Shade II?
In Chrissie's timeline, the Beatles didn't split up and recorded a hallucinodelic album in 1972 – Never Mind (strictly, Never Mind the Beatles) – which literally changed the world. Set in an alternative 2020s London, this hugely entertaining, darkly humorous superhero tale is packed with Newman's trademark wit, and comes with wickedly sharp edges.
When Chrissie Chambers (model actress whatever) discovers her soap opera character is about to be killed off, she finally stops dieting and discovers hitherto untapped supernatural abilities. Meanwhile, Chrissie's aunt - former national heroine Lady Shade - goes missing. Afraid for Jasmine's safety and itching to costume-up, Chrissie and her ghost-possessed best friend Loulee break into Devil's Dyke, the asylum where Jasmine works as a therapist with the most dangerous cutthroats (supervillains) in Britain… only to find the inmates have taken over… Chrissie debuts successfully as a cloak (superheroine), but who will become the arch-nemesis of Lady Shade II?
In Chrissie's timeline, the Beatles didn't split up and recorded a hallucinodelic album in 1972 – Never Mind (strictly, Never Mind the Beatles) – which literally changed the world. Set in an alternative 2020s London, this hugely entertaining, darkly humorous superhero tale is packed with Newman's trademark wit, and comes with wickedly sharp edges.
463 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 12, 2026
About the author
Kim Newman
284 books961 followersNote: This author also writes under the pseudonym of Jack Yeovil.
An expert on horror and sci-fi cinema (his books of film criticism include Nightmare Movies and Millennium Movies), Kim Newman's novels draw promiscuously on the tropes of horror, sci-fi and fantasy. He is complexly and irreverently referential; the Dracula sequence--Anno Dracula, The Bloody Red Baron and Dracula,Cha Cha Cha--not only portrays an alternate world in which the Count conquers Victorian Britain for a while, is the mastermind behind Germany's air aces in World War One and survives into a jetset 1950s of paparazzi and La Dolce Vita, but does so with endless throwaway references that range from Kipling to James Bond, from Edgar Allen Poe to Patricia Highsmith.
In horror novels such as Bad Dreams and Jago, reality turns out to be endlessly subverted by the powerfully malign. His pseudonymous novels, as Jack Yeovil, play elegant games with genre cliche--perhaps the best of these is the sword-and-sorcery novel Drachenfels which takes the prescribed formulae of the games company to whose bible it was written and make them over entirely into a Kim Newman novel.
Life's Lottery, his most mainstream novel, consists of multiple choice fragments which enable readers to choose the hero's fate and take him into horror, crime and sf storylines or into mundane reality.
An expert on horror and sci-fi cinema (his books of film criticism include Nightmare Movies and Millennium Movies), Kim Newman's novels draw promiscuously on the tropes of horror, sci-fi and fantasy. He is complexly and irreverently referential; the Dracula sequence--Anno Dracula, The Bloody Red Baron and Dracula,Cha Cha Cha--not only portrays an alternate world in which the Count conquers Victorian Britain for a while, is the mastermind behind Germany's air aces in World War One and survives into a jetset 1950s of paparazzi and La Dolce Vita, but does so with endless throwaway references that range from Kipling to James Bond, from Edgar Allen Poe to Patricia Highsmith.
In horror novels such as Bad Dreams and Jago, reality turns out to be endlessly subverted by the powerfully malign. His pseudonymous novels, as Jack Yeovil, play elegant games with genre cliche--perhaps the best of these is the sword-and-sorcery novel Drachenfels which takes the prescribed formulae of the games company to whose bible it was written and make them over entirely into a Kim Newman novel.
Life's Lottery, his most mainstream novel, consists of multiple choice fragments which enable readers to choose the hero's fate and take him into horror, crime and sf storylines or into mundane reality.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
June 5, 2026
The premise of this book had me anticipating it since last year, and I bought it the day of release. It's an alternate-timeline Britain where The Beatles didn't break up, and instead released Never Mind the Beatles in 1972, a psychedelic album that literally warped reality, changing the laws of physics and consciousness. The result was some people suddenly had abilities that made them either superheroes (cloaks) or supervillains (cutthroats). However, Newman's writing is so densely populated with made-up slang, and frantic dialog that seems purposefully difficult to parse like Thomas Pynchon, that the first couple hundred pages are a slog. I realized I had similar issues with Anno Dracula way back when. If you do manage to figure out the slang and what the heck the characters are up to, the plot is not that compelling. It's chock full of colorful characters as if from a comic book and some witty satire, but disappointingly, the story doesn't hold up.
May 12, 2026
The start of this one drops you straight into the world, not much time for catching up with the world building but you’ll get it as you go along. We start as Christie, soap opera actress, is fired, through no fault of her own, but the star of the show cannot be outdone by a smaller player, especially not a pretty young one. With her career seemingly over Chrissie is worried about her future, but not for long. A small encounter with a mugging leads her to discover she has powers, superhero powers. When a video of this is shared online and becomes viral her aunt knows it’s time for the talk. The talk being that their family are known superhero’s, that her dieting for acting is the only thing that’s delayed her powers and that she must eat, excessively so for her powers to charge. Her aunt, former superhero Lady Shade, now works with super villains in a sort of institute specifically for those with powers. One breakout and all hell breaks loose, chrissie and her best friend Loulee deciede they have to go save her and the others. Chrissies superhero outfit is thrown together from mixed family closets while loulee is hiding her own secret of powers - there just never seemed a good time to explain how you find a lantern and now she the spirits from it and also have their incredible varied skills. The two run head first into danger and both find they do not know how powerful they truly are. A superhero team needs a new member and what better way to choose than a tv reality show having 6 people compete for the privilege, what could possibly go wrong?
This alternative universe takes a hot second to understand, superhero’s are called cloaks, villains are called cutthroats, a whole bunch of things never happened in this timeline, the technology seems similar but with different words that make you feel old like you don’t understand the kids slang anymore.
Overall I give this one 4 ⭐️, the ending did not seem final and I’m curious if there’ll be more to come
This alternative universe takes a hot second to understand, superhero’s are called cloaks, villains are called cutthroats, a whole bunch of things never happened in this timeline, the technology seems similar but with different words that make you feel old like you don’t understand the kids slang anymore.
Overall I give this one 4 ⭐️, the ending did not seem final and I’m curious if there’ll be more to come
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
This is one of those books like A Clockwork Orange - not, fortunately, in the sense of the old ultraviolence, though there is some non-ultra violence, but in the sense that it's thick with its own jargon that takes a bit of getting used to. I did get used to it after a while, but it made for heavy going at first, and contributed to a sense that everything was happening at a manic pace while there was also not much plot per thousand words. It gave me a sense of alienation and confusion, which may have been deliberate, because that's where the characters were emotionally a lot of the time. It's set in an alternate present-day Britain, with that underlying sense of hopelessness in the face of ineluctable corporate evil that a lot of modern British writing has, but it keeps a kind of dark sense of humour through it all.
Some of the jargon and cultural references would be immediately understood by British people, but not by non-British people, of whom I am one, and I wasn't always sure what was a real British thing and what was part of the alternate world until I looked something up that had a Wikipedia entry and discovered it was a real British thing. The relative seamlessness between the real and made-up ones is a strength, I suppose.
The main "alternate" part is that there are superheroes (known as "capes") and supervillains ("cutthroats") in this version of history, especially since the Beatles did a psychoactive album in the 70s that awakened a lot of people to their powers, although there were some prior to that as well. Queen Victoria II is on the throne.
The heroine of the title, Chrissie, loses her job as a supporting cast member on a long-running TV crime drama, because she's getting too popular and threatening the fragile ego of the star, and when she breaks her long-time starvation diet of celery and distilled water and gets some actual calories in her, her powers come online for the first time. She's inherited a family tendency to shadow-based superpowers - one of her non-superpowered ancestors was Dr Shade, and powers seem to follow a law of nominative determinism, like someone with the surname Wax being able to manipulate wax figures. This is on brand for superhero fiction, of course. (Actually, as the book went on I concluded that the author was just using silly names as part of the comedy, which is one of my least favourite comedy tricks.)
Anyway, it turns out Chrissie's really good at using the powers, and her close friend also has abilities she hadn't ever found the right moment to talk about. They help to contain a breakout in a secure psychiatric facility for criminally insane - or at least psychologically troubled - powered people, and then get involved with a reality TV show that's supposed to be selecting a replacement for a recently-retired member of an elite superhero team. But there are wheels within wheels, a conspiracy that's manipulating events, including a team of villains being set up as the opposition for the hero candidates on the show, and it's not clear for a long time whether the motive is corporate greed, sheer insane evil or a combination. We get a recurring viewpoint from the sanest of the villain team, as well as from Chrissie and her friend Loulee, and from the lead on Chrissie's old show who also becomes the host of the reality show. There are a few guest viewpoints too, some of them in "debrief" or confessional-to-camera mode that give hints of what's coming up or going on behind the scenes.
There are a few too many characters to keep track of easily, especially since, like in a Russian novel, most of them are known by more than one name (their real name and their superhero "trade name"). Most of them are distinctive enough as characters that I didn't often get confused, but along with the jargon blizzard it made for a book that isn't easy to read.
The writing mechanics are reasonably good, just the odd hyphen where it shouldn't be and a large number of sentences in the simple past tense that should be past perfect (because they refer back to a time prior to the narrative moment). There are a couple of homonym errors, which is not many for a supers novel, though it's more than I would have hoped for from an experienced author and a major publisher. There is one extended dialog exchange where two people are talking, with no tags, and if you count the alternations to figure out who's saying what - which you shouldn't have to do - it comes out wrong, as if even the author has lost track, or else the author or editor has mispunctuated some of the dialog so that two consecutive paragraphs from the same speaker seem to be from different speakers. There are sentences with words missing, something that's hard to spot unless you have the knack. Note that I read a pre-publication copy via Netgalley, and there may be further editing yet to come, though it's unlikelyto resolve all the issues, especially the past perfect tense issue, the most prevalentand to me most annoying one.
Overall, what with one thing and another I didn't love it, though I certainly didn't hate it either. It's a bit darker than I prefer, and was hard work to follow because of the jargon, cultural references, large cast, and tense issues (which kept whiplashing me between the narrative moment and an earlier moment without signalling). It also felt wordy, and therefore slow-moving overall, even though it was describing a lot of fast-moving action at times and many of the chapters are short. While I was sympathetic with several of the characters in their predicament, they didn't ever get much depth, and Chrissy sometimes seemed competent when that felt unlikely. The humour was less funny to me than it sometimes seemed to think it was, and on the dark side. The vicious satire on the TV industry made me wonder just how that industry had hurt the author.
Going in, I thought it might not be for me at all, partly because I know the author writes horror, and partly because the main character was clearly going to be from a milieu where people are encouraged to be shallow and artificial. Coming out, I'd say it's not my ideal book, but I can see its strengths: imagination, consistent worldbuilding, good action set-pieces, a cast tied together by believable though simple relationships, a relatively complex plot with multiple strands woven skillfully. It was interesting enough for me to want to finish, rather than abandon in the middle.
In summary, then, I wouldn't recommend it to my earlier self if I could time travel, but it might be a good fit for you, depending on your taste. Even though at least one minor mystery (why the Deputy Prime Minister seems to be in charge, and what happened to the PM) remains unelucidated in this book, I won't be reading the author's other books in hopes of an answer.
Some of the jargon and cultural references would be immediately understood by British people, but not by non-British people, of whom I am one, and I wasn't always sure what was a real British thing and what was part of the alternate world until I looked something up that had a Wikipedia entry and discovered it was a real British thing. The relative seamlessness between the real and made-up ones is a strength, I suppose.
The main "alternate" part is that there are superheroes (known as "capes") and supervillains ("cutthroats") in this version of history, especially since the Beatles did a psychoactive album in the 70s that awakened a lot of people to their powers, although there were some prior to that as well. Queen Victoria II is on the throne.
The heroine of the title, Chrissie, loses her job as a supporting cast member on a long-running TV crime drama, because she's getting too popular and threatening the fragile ego of the star, and when she breaks her long-time starvation diet of celery and distilled water and gets some actual calories in her, her powers come online for the first time. She's inherited a family tendency to shadow-based superpowers - one of her non-superpowered ancestors was Dr Shade, and powers seem to follow a law of nominative determinism, like someone with the surname Wax being able to manipulate wax figures. This is on brand for superhero fiction, of course. (Actually, as the book went on I concluded that the author was just using silly names as part of the comedy, which is one of my least favourite comedy tricks.)
Anyway, it turns out Chrissie's really good at using the powers, and her close friend also has abilities she hadn't ever found the right moment to talk about. They help to contain a breakout in a secure psychiatric facility for criminally insane - or at least psychologically troubled - powered people, and then get involved with a reality TV show that's supposed to be selecting a replacement for a recently-retired member of an elite superhero team. But there are wheels within wheels, a conspiracy that's manipulating events, including a team of villains being set up as the opposition for the hero candidates on the show, and it's not clear for a long time whether the motive is corporate greed, sheer insane evil or a combination. We get a recurring viewpoint from the sanest of the villain team, as well as from Chrissie and her friend Loulee, and from the lead on Chrissie's old show who also becomes the host of the reality show. There are a few guest viewpoints too, some of them in "debrief" or confessional-to-camera mode that give hints of what's coming up or going on behind the scenes.
There are a few too many characters to keep track of easily, especially since, like in a Russian novel, most of them are known by more than one name (their real name and their superhero "trade name"). Most of them are distinctive enough as characters that I didn't often get confused, but along with the jargon blizzard it made for a book that isn't easy to read.
The writing mechanics are reasonably good, just the odd hyphen where it shouldn't be and a large number of sentences in the simple past tense that should be past perfect (because they refer back to a time prior to the narrative moment). There are a couple of homonym errors, which is not many for a supers novel, though it's more than I would have hoped for from an experienced author and a major publisher. There is one extended dialog exchange where two people are talking, with no tags, and if you count the alternations to figure out who's saying what - which you shouldn't have to do - it comes out wrong, as if even the author has lost track, or else the author or editor has mispunctuated some of the dialog so that two consecutive paragraphs from the same speaker seem to be from different speakers. There are sentences with words missing, something that's hard to spot unless you have the knack. Note that I read a pre-publication copy via Netgalley, and there may be further editing yet to come, though it's unlikelyto resolve all the issues, especially the past perfect tense issue, the most prevalentand to me most annoying one.
Overall, what with one thing and another I didn't love it, though I certainly didn't hate it either. It's a bit darker than I prefer, and was hard work to follow because of the jargon, cultural references, large cast, and tense issues (which kept whiplashing me between the narrative moment and an earlier moment without signalling). It also felt wordy, and therefore slow-moving overall, even though it was describing a lot of fast-moving action at times and many of the chapters are short. While I was sympathetic with several of the characters in their predicament, they didn't ever get much depth, and Chrissy sometimes seemed competent when that felt unlikely. The humour was less funny to me than it sometimes seemed to think it was, and on the dark side. The vicious satire on the TV industry made me wonder just how that industry had hurt the author.
Going in, I thought it might not be for me at all, partly because I know the author writes horror, and partly because the main character was clearly going to be from a milieu where people are encouraged to be shallow and artificial. Coming out, I'd say it's not my ideal book, but I can see its strengths: imagination, consistent worldbuilding, good action set-pieces, a cast tied together by believable though simple relationships, a relatively complex plot with multiple strands woven skillfully. It was interesting enough for me to want to finish, rather than abandon in the middle.
In summary, then, I wouldn't recommend it to my earlier self if I could time travel, but it might be a good fit for you, depending on your taste. Even though at least one minor mystery (why the Deputy Prime Minister seems to be in charge, and what happened to the PM) remains unelucidated in this book, I won't be reading the author's other books in hopes of an answer.
June 4, 2026
Special ordered from Browser Books on Fillmore, using student-given gift card.
Can a novel have too many ideas? This one might. It teeters right on the edge of rich and too-rich, set in an alt-history London where the Beatles never broke up and recorded an album that unleashed nascent superpowers in the population. (Though, oddly, we never see the band anywhere in the novel.) That's just the opening conceit--there's social satire, Newman's trademark love of Very British Things like Girl Guides, an empire of reality-TV competition shows about making superhero teams and Jupiter missions, and his feminist rereading of pop history. Some of it fits into his other novels, with Richard Jeperson appearing here in a small role, and the whole thing is written in a slangy, fizzy dayglo cousin to what Burgess was up to in A Clockwork Orange.
Our heroine, Chrissy Chambers, is toiling away as a supporting character on one of those endless British police procedurals (we have Britbox, and sometimes I consider watching some series I've a heard a little bit about, only to realize it's run fo 27 seasons or whatever) when she ends up serendipitously discovering that, like her aunt, who's appeared in other Newman books, she has superpowers. What does this mean for her social-media profile? For her daily life? Her career prospects? And what do her powers do, anyway? There's social comedy, and media satire, and rafts of superheroes and villains--seriously, the quantity of punning names here, and the concepts behind them, are astonishing.
Maybe it's the small print as well as the density of ideas. Not sure--enjoyable, but also a bit exhausting as a whole. I ended the novel intrigued, though, and would definitely read what seems to be pointed to as a sequel in the last few pages.
Can a novel have too many ideas? This one might. It teeters right on the edge of rich and too-rich, set in an alt-history London where the Beatles never broke up and recorded an album that unleashed nascent superpowers in the population. (Though, oddly, we never see the band anywhere in the novel.) That's just the opening conceit--there's social satire, Newman's trademark love of Very British Things like Girl Guides, an empire of reality-TV competition shows about making superhero teams and Jupiter missions, and his feminist rereading of pop history. Some of it fits into his other novels, with Richard Jeperson appearing here in a small role, and the whole thing is written in a slangy, fizzy dayglo cousin to what Burgess was up to in A Clockwork Orange.
Our heroine, Chrissy Chambers, is toiling away as a supporting character on one of those endless British police procedurals (we have Britbox, and sometimes I consider watching some series I've a heard a little bit about, only to realize it's run fo 27 seasons or whatever) when she ends up serendipitously discovering that, like her aunt, who's appeared in other Newman books, she has superpowers. What does this mean for her social-media profile? For her daily life? Her career prospects? And what do her powers do, anyway? There's social comedy, and media satire, and rafts of superheroes and villains--seriously, the quantity of punning names here, and the concepts behind them, are astonishing.
Maybe it's the small print as well as the density of ideas. Not sure--enjoyable, but also a bit exhausting as a whole. I ended the novel intrigued, though, and would definitely read what seems to be pointed to as a sequel in the last few pages.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Model Actress Whatever is one of those books where I kept thinking, “What on earth am I reading?” and then immediately, “…okay but I’m kind of into it.”
Chrissie Chambers (yes, model actress whatever) is a soap star about to be dramatically killed off on screen, so naturally she stops dieting, embraces chaos, and accidentally unlocks supernatural powers. As you do. Add in a missing aunt who used to be a national superhero icon (Lady Shade), a ghost possessed best friend, and a supervillain asylum called Devil’s Dyke where the inmates have very much seized control, and you’ve got yourself a gloriously unhinged setup.
Kim Newman absolutely leans into satire here. This book skewers celebrity culture, superhero tropes, media obsession, and British weirdness with sharp wit and a knowing grin. The alternative reality London is a highlight especially the detail that the Beatles never split up and instead released a psychedelic album in 1972 that literally changed the world. That kind of bonkers world building is where this book shines.
That said, while I loved the ideas, the execution didn’t always fully land for me. At times it felt a bit chaotic and crowded, like it was juggling too many clever concepts at once. Chrissie herself is fun but occasionally felt more like a vehicle for the satire than a fully grounded character, which kept me slightly at arm’s length.
Still, this is dark, funny, clever, and undeniably very Kim Newman. If you enjoy superhero stories with sharp edges, soap opera melodrama turned up to eleven, and alternative histories that gleefully mess with reality, this is worth picking up.
Messy? Yes. Entertaining? Also yes. A solid 3.5 stars from me and bonus points for being unapologetically weird.
Chrissie Chambers (yes, model actress whatever) is a soap star about to be dramatically killed off on screen, so naturally she stops dieting, embraces chaos, and accidentally unlocks supernatural powers. As you do. Add in a missing aunt who used to be a national superhero icon (Lady Shade), a ghost possessed best friend, and a supervillain asylum called Devil’s Dyke where the inmates have very much seized control, and you’ve got yourself a gloriously unhinged setup.
Kim Newman absolutely leans into satire here. This book skewers celebrity culture, superhero tropes, media obsession, and British weirdness with sharp wit and a knowing grin. The alternative reality London is a highlight especially the detail that the Beatles never split up and instead released a psychedelic album in 1972 that literally changed the world. That kind of bonkers world building is where this book shines.
That said, while I loved the ideas, the execution didn’t always fully land for me. At times it felt a bit chaotic and crowded, like it was juggling too many clever concepts at once. Chrissie herself is fun but occasionally felt more like a vehicle for the satire than a fully grounded character, which kept me slightly at arm’s length.
Still, this is dark, funny, clever, and undeniably very Kim Newman. If you enjoy superhero stories with sharp edges, soap opera melodrama turned up to eleven, and alternative histories that gleefully mess with reality, this is worth picking up.
Messy? Yes. Entertaining? Also yes. A solid 3.5 stars from me and bonus points for being unapologetically weird.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
This is a book with voice.
It has a fast-paced, tongue-in-cheek, 10,000 jokes, heavy British slang, alternative world jargon and continuous action and banter.
The plot is amazingly paced, you feel the experience of the writer, how the ideas fit together, how it twists, how it brings back things from earlier. It's good, it's clever, it's fast thinking, it's biting satire, and it's impressive.
So why am I only giving it 3 stars? I love voice! I crave and look for voice all the time!
The answer might be too much context I don't have.
I once tried to read a vampire fantasy set amongst Harlem gangs. And I felt completely out of my depth. I understood very little, because the slang was so heavy. Sorting what was action from flavour, slowing down to think about every 2 words, having whole sentences up in the air until I had more context to guess at meaning by inference, made it a very slow and not particularly pleasant read.
I just couldn't get into the story because the language barrier kept me looking at the words on the page, rather than sucking me into the world, having forgotten that I am in fact a person sitting with a book in hand.
This was similar. The language ends up being a barrier that slowed me at every sentence. While you do get faster as you get used to it, it's still work if you're not British or at least watching a heavy dose of British shows.
Can you have too much voice?
I don't think so, it's absolutely essential so we don't become this sad soup of sameness, but you do reduce the accessibility.
I would recommend to readers who want to escape the bland, and want superhero worlds with heavy brit flavour, and that beloved absurdist and biting humour. Something as fresh as Misfits when it came out, without the gritty gloomness.
It has a fast-paced, tongue-in-cheek, 10,000 jokes, heavy British slang, alternative world jargon and continuous action and banter.
The plot is amazingly paced, you feel the experience of the writer, how the ideas fit together, how it twists, how it brings back things from earlier. It's good, it's clever, it's fast thinking, it's biting satire, and it's impressive.
So why am I only giving it 3 stars? I love voice! I crave and look for voice all the time!
The answer might be too much context I don't have.
I once tried to read a vampire fantasy set amongst Harlem gangs. And I felt completely out of my depth. I understood very little, because the slang was so heavy. Sorting what was action from flavour, slowing down to think about every 2 words, having whole sentences up in the air until I had more context to guess at meaning by inference, made it a very slow and not particularly pleasant read.
I just couldn't get into the story because the language barrier kept me looking at the words on the page, rather than sucking me into the world, having forgotten that I am in fact a person sitting with a book in hand.
This was similar. The language ends up being a barrier that slowed me at every sentence. While you do get faster as you get used to it, it's still work if you're not British or at least watching a heavy dose of British shows.
Can you have too much voice?
I don't think so, it's absolutely essential so we don't become this sad soup of sameness, but you do reduce the accessibility.
I would recommend to readers who want to escape the bland, and want superhero worlds with heavy brit flavour, and that beloved absurdist and biting humour. Something as fresh as Misfits when it came out, without the gritty gloomness.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
3.5/ 5 stars - 3.5/ 5 stars - thank you to Titan and Netgalley for this ARC.
I went into Model Actress Whatever not sure what to expect and came out of it still slightly unsure of what I read, but I know I enjoyed it.
The story follows Chrissie Chambers, a soap actress facing an on-screen death who promptly stops following her extreme diet (so relatable) and discovers that, with actual food, comes actual superpowers. From there, things spiral .. a missing former-superhero aunt, a best friend tangled up with ghosts, and an institution for villains that has very much lost control of its inmates. It’s chaotic, surreal, and I felt deliberately over the top.
Newman's version of London is recognisable but constantly off kilter, filled with alternate history details and funny twists. I loved the British slang! The book leans heavily into satire, poking at fame, media culture, and superhero conventions with a very dry British edge. Sometimes the language added to the confusion, however.
The friendship between Chrissie and Loulee is a highlight, and Loulee’s connection to the supernatural adds an interesting thread to the story. At the same time, it doesn’t always come together smoothly. The pacing is relentlessly quick, and with so many concepts competing for attention, it felt overwhelming. Combined with the dense worldbuilding and shifting terminology, I occasionally found it difficult to keep track of what was happening. Chrissie herself is entertaining, but never quite felt fully developed beyond her role in the satire.
Overall, this is an imaginative, strange, and often amusing read that doesn’t quite land every idea it throws out, but I can assure you it’s never dull.
I went into Model Actress Whatever not sure what to expect and came out of it still slightly unsure of what I read, but I know I enjoyed it.
The story follows Chrissie Chambers, a soap actress facing an on-screen death who promptly stops following her extreme diet (so relatable) and discovers that, with actual food, comes actual superpowers. From there, things spiral .. a missing former-superhero aunt, a best friend tangled up with ghosts, and an institution for villains that has very much lost control of its inmates. It’s chaotic, surreal, and I felt deliberately over the top.
Newman's version of London is recognisable but constantly off kilter, filled with alternate history details and funny twists. I loved the British slang! The book leans heavily into satire, poking at fame, media culture, and superhero conventions with a very dry British edge. Sometimes the language added to the confusion, however.
The friendship between Chrissie and Loulee is a highlight, and Loulee’s connection to the supernatural adds an interesting thread to the story. At the same time, it doesn’t always come together smoothly. The pacing is relentlessly quick, and with so many concepts competing for attention, it felt overwhelming. Combined with the dense worldbuilding and shifting terminology, I occasionally found it difficult to keep track of what was happening. Chrissie herself is entertaining, but never quite felt fully developed beyond her role in the satire.
Overall, this is an imaginative, strange, and often amusing read that doesn’t quite land every idea it throws out, but I can assure you it’s never dull.
April 2, 2026
I read an eARC of this book on NetGalley so thank you to the author and the publisher.
This book is set in an Alternate London. There’s recognisable parts of our world, but things that have changed both subtly and dramatically. Some things are quite fun and affectionate little nods to British culture (opal fruits!) others are larger changes like the powers some people now possess making them heroes or villains.
Our main character discovers she has powers once she starts eating food after giving up the celery and distilled water diet her doctor has had her on to stay thin. With a proper caloric intake she comes into her powers.
I liked the two female characters and their friendship that’s integral to the story. Christie, our newly super powered actress, and Loulee who speaks to ghosts. Loulee was really cool and I liked the storyline involving her, the ghosts and the lantern.
I liked that the author had explored the concept of an alternate world that differed from ours but is still recognisable. There were some details that were quite fun such as the story behind the statue. There’s a lot linguistically which is different, including slang, new phrasing, changes to names and jargon. While I liked this in some ways for adding personality to the book, at times it did make it a little hard to follow.
This is my third book from this author and it was the one I’ve found hardest to follow. The pace is frenetic, it moves at such speed that it would be hard to keep up anyway, but throw in all the new language to learn and it did mean I was a little disoriented at times.
There was a lot I found really interesting in this book, little touches or anecdotes, character motivations and actions. So a lot to like but just a little hard to follow at times.
This book is set in an Alternate London. There’s recognisable parts of our world, but things that have changed both subtly and dramatically. Some things are quite fun and affectionate little nods to British culture (opal fruits!) others are larger changes like the powers some people now possess making them heroes or villains.
Our main character discovers she has powers once she starts eating food after giving up the celery and distilled water diet her doctor has had her on to stay thin. With a proper caloric intake she comes into her powers.
I liked the two female characters and their friendship that’s integral to the story. Christie, our newly super powered actress, and Loulee who speaks to ghosts. Loulee was really cool and I liked the storyline involving her, the ghosts and the lantern.
I liked that the author had explored the concept of an alternate world that differed from ours but is still recognisable. There were some details that were quite fun such as the story behind the statue. There’s a lot linguistically which is different, including slang, new phrasing, changes to names and jargon. While I liked this in some ways for adding personality to the book, at times it did make it a little hard to follow.
This is my third book from this author and it was the one I’ve found hardest to follow. The pace is frenetic, it moves at such speed that it would be hard to keep up anyway, but throw in all the new language to learn and it did mean I was a little disoriented at times.
There was a lot I found really interesting in this book, little touches or anecdotes, character motivations and actions. So a lot to like but just a little hard to follow at times.
June 13, 2026
This book throws you in to a world where everything is changed, including the jargon of the young characters we meet at the beginning. It takes a few chapters to get used to the high speed, corporate, corrupt world the girls exist in and to get your ear in to what they are saying, but it is worth the initial discomfort.
The girls turn out to be less superficial and unintelligent than I anticipated, aspiring to be a whatever doesn't initially appeal, but I can see that gap years could be like that perhaps.
Anyway, things develop and a large cast of characters are introduced into what seems like a reality style game show, but is it entertainment when people are actually getting seriously hurt?
Maybe I went too deep, but it seems to me that some of this is a commentary on social media, the manipulation and construction of 'news' and the victims thereof. Very relevant to the world right now.
The other important aspect of the book for me, is the quiet, pointless and non heroic death of a character I have loved throughout many of Kim Newman's stories and books which is mourned by one character alone and not explained. I suppose sometimes people just die and we have to go to the funeral and try to make sense of life without them.
Apart from that, the book is quite fun, very inventive, sparkling with ideas and the characters have stayed with me.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
I really wanted to like Model Actress Whatever more than I did. At a time when superhero stories feel oversaturated (and the big American publishers seem stuck recycling their own mythologies), there's something genuinely refreshing about Kim Newman striking out in such a wildly different direction.
His universe draws unapologetically from a very specific, deeply British pop-cultural imagination: the kind that might have taken shape in the mind of a 1970s child glued to TV and comics.
But ambition becomes the book's undoing. In trying to pack an entire superhero cosmos into a single volume (complete with real names, "trade names”, and a blizzard of nicknames), the narrative turns into a kind of noise. There's so much going on that it’s difficult to pick out a clear thread, let alone a satisfying emotional throughline.
That's a shame, because there are flashes of brilliance here: concepts like the Purple, the Ghost Lantern, and GEIST hint at a richer, more focused story. Had the novel chosen to centre on just a handful of these ideas, it might have found the clarity and impact it lacks. As it stands, the book feels less like an invitation into a world and more like a glimpse inside Newman's own imagination: fascinating, certainly, but not always accessible to the reader.
His universe draws unapologetically from a very specific, deeply British pop-cultural imagination: the kind that might have taken shape in the mind of a 1970s child glued to TV and comics.
But ambition becomes the book's undoing. In trying to pack an entire superhero cosmos into a single volume (complete with real names, "trade names”, and a blizzard of nicknames), the narrative turns into a kind of noise. There's so much going on that it’s difficult to pick out a clear thread, let alone a satisfying emotional throughline.
That's a shame, because there are flashes of brilliance here: concepts like the Purple, the Ghost Lantern, and GEIST hint at a richer, more focused story. Had the novel chosen to centre on just a handful of these ideas, it might have found the clarity and impact it lacks. As it stands, the book feels less like an invitation into a world and more like a glimpse inside Newman's own imagination: fascinating, certainly, but not always accessible to the reader.
June 20, 2026
This is a book rich in promise that it didn’t, for me, live up to. Over the years, I have read and enjoyed many of Kim Newman’s books and I came to this with high hopes. Perhaps it is simply that those hopes were too high, but this was a book I found hard to get myself into and - in the end - disappointing.
It might not be helped by the fact that a superhero story is something I am less interested in than, say, a vampire Jack the Ripper mash up or the untold adventures of Professor Moriarty, but this fell rather flat. It isn’t helped by the use of distracting slang, especially early in the book. It certain isn’t helped by the fact that much of the first half of the book isn’t very interesting: there is little of Newman’s trademark wit and humour and oddly even less excitement or engaging action.
It’s only fair to say that things pick up in the second half with a reality TV game show to choose between superheroes to join a sort of Avengers line up. There are touches of satire and referential humour that lift the confection into something like Newman’s normal style but, even here, the actual superhero stuff tends to bring things down.
Sadly, two and a half stars, really.
Thanks to NetGalley for advance proof for review.
It might not be helped by the fact that a superhero story is something I am less interested in than, say, a vampire Jack the Ripper mash up or the untold adventures of Professor Moriarty, but this fell rather flat. It isn’t helped by the use of distracting slang, especially early in the book. It certain isn’t helped by the fact that much of the first half of the book isn’t very interesting: there is little of Newman’s trademark wit and humour and oddly even less excitement or engaging action.
It’s only fair to say that things pick up in the second half with a reality TV game show to choose between superheroes to join a sort of Avengers line up. There are touches of satire and referential humour that lift the confection into something like Newman’s normal style but, even here, the actual superhero stuff tends to bring things down.
Sadly, two and a half stars, really.
Thanks to NetGalley for advance proof for review.
June 8, 2026
Newman strays from his horror roots and embraces outrageous comic book sensibilities in this slangy pop culture parody adventure. Not my favorite from him (it took me a while to get used to the prose, and the plot leans heavily into the absurd), but middling Kim Newman is still an enduring pleasure to read.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Didn't quite land for me. Some of the vibes worked, but the setting and writing was incredibly complicated in a way that felt unbefitting of the story. 3 stars. tysm for the E-ARC.
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