Hello.
I’m Matthew Blakstad. I write pacy, character-driven fiction that explores the impact of technology on how we live and who we are. My books include Sockpuppet, a riotous thriller for the internet age, Fallen Angel, its explosive prequel, and Lucky Ghost – a conspiracy thriller for an world that prefers conspiracies to facts.
books
Books I’ve written and work-in-progress.
Sockpuppet, Lucky Ghost and Fallen Angel are out now from Hodder & Stoughton.
FOLLOW
Find me on Twitter at @mattblak -
for more of the same stuff as on this site, but with fewer words and more puns.
COMMUNITY
Be part of the Hodder & Stoughton community at Hodderscape.
For all things genre-related. Plus dodos.
reviews
“Embedded with techy jargon and shards of wit, Sockpuppet takes a snapshot of our age ... The result is compelling”
“One of the standout debuts of the year ... marks Matthew Blakstad as an extremely talented new voice”
“The writing is sharp and absolutely immersive and the world created is all too likely [...] Always character driven, never dull and with a totally edge of the seat banging finale.”
“Lucky Ghost in its themes and delivery is brave, bold and dare I say, even, ominous ... A look at humanity at its best and its worst.”
“Way more visionary than its predecessor, Sockpuppet, yet its thought-provoking prophesy remains both powerful and effective.”
Blog
To celebrate the publication of Lucky Ghost, I recently set out on the Ghost Train - a whistle-stop tour of some of the finest book blogs on the internet.
Crimes against reality don’t usually end in bloodshed. Their ammunition is public opinion, their shotgun barrel the internet; and the victims are people’s reputations. When they’re committed, these crimes seem trivial, even ludicrous – but their consequences can be lethal.
On the day of Donald Trump's inauguration, surely now’s the time to start making up the news we actually want to see this year?
I write stories about technology, and how it affects our experience of the world. Which is why, last month, I contributed to a series of blog posts about writing and the senses. This might seem a contradiction to many people. After all, doesn’t technology dampen our senses?
There was a brief spell, between the white heat years of the 1960’s and the gaudy disaster of the 1980’s, when futurology blossomed. This was the final gasp of a post-war love affair with centralised planning.
Today’s internet is a wild frontier where new ways of doing harm are being invented every day. If crime fiction is to keep pace with the world, it needs to embrace technology, not shy from it.
The government's launch of an online identity management system echoes the ill-fated 'Digital Citizen' project from my novel Sockpuppet. I wrote a piece about this for The Independent.
I couldn't resist writing something about the very public meltdown of Microsoft's chatbot, Tay. It's just too close to the events in my novel, Sockpuppet. You can read my piece, 'Je Suis Tay', on Pornokitsch.
If you fire up Google and type in the words 'Bacon number' followed by an actor's name, it'll give you (surprise!) that actor's Bacon number. I recently tried this on myself. The result took me in a wholly unexpected direction.
Each time I finished a draft of my first novel, Sockpuppet, I went onto the self-publishing site lulu.com and ordered a physical paperback copy. A limited edition of one, in a plain white cover, with me its only reader.
Mark as read
A dynamic, beautifully written debut that moves effortlessly between ultra-contemporary London, the wilds of a remote Scottish island, and a fantastic reality that underpins them both.
With this punchy debut, Felicia Yap has hit on a winning formula from the very start. This is a book that will keep you guessing to the very end. It’s going to be massive.
The ocean’s a zone where you can be completely free; or vanish utterly. It’s against this elemental force that Claire Fuller has set her powerful second novel. Like all the best stories, Swimming Lessons has secrets hidden in every nook.
The Wolf Road was one of my stand-out reads of 2016. It could be a classic adventure story of the West, except that it takes place in a post-apocalyptic America that might almost have come to be.
When your American dream turns sour, where do you run to? In this case, America. Or at least to its wild, disjunct north-western annex.
I don't know if the black-magic-noir-black-comedy genre was ever a thing but it is now. And that's a lot of black to pack into a single genre. Poison City is Paul Crilley's adult fiction debut and it's a cracker.
Author photo: Paul Treacy.
“A fascinating and hair-raising examination of just how much we are in thrall to computers, and how willingly we give up our privacy.”