BOOK: ED ATKINS PLAYS VAMPIRE SURVIVORS

About fifteen minutes into a run as Sammy the caterpillar, the phone can go on your lap.

The thumb has finished its work.

You are still technically playing.

Flower (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2025) is Ed Atkins’s anti-memoir, built from accumulated preferences, bodily admissions, and things he desperately craves.

Not quite autofiction. More like automated fiction.

Flower moves through Doritos, food colouring, television deaths, mobile games, and compulsive forms of self-inventory and self-harm.

There is a long passage, close to the end, about Vampire Survivors. A sui generis walkthrough.

Here the game is described as a system of repetition, touch, comfort, and death, written in the same matter-of-fact register as the food he colours blue, his dislike for public speaking, and the grim reaper arriving so fast there is no time to react... (continues)