In Capture Spiral: An Escape from Memory, Jez Conolly revisits the haunted textures of a 1970s childhood on the Lincolnshire coast, where faded seaside amusements and family silences conceal deeper undercurrents of curiosity, dread, and wonder. Written with precision, wit, and a lyrical eye for the uncanny, this memoir intertwines personal history with cultural memory, uncovering the makeshift surreal hiding in the mundane. A beautifully unsettling portrait of place, time, and the strange persistence of the past.
 
Jez Conolly's "storied" interior odyssey charts his experiences of the prosaic and incongruous from childhood through puberty, fighting for an inner escape from the strangulating conformity of Cleethorpes. A mixtape of memories past, from two tortoises named Toby to the rotating clown heads of Wonderland. Capture Spiral is a user's guide for a night gallery of childhood-origin neuroses, and a celebration of the "great escape" we call imagination.
—Stephen Volk, author of Ghostwatch
 
A brilliant, cynical, heart-warming autobiography, wrapped in nostalgia and hauntology, but with poison-tipped needles at its core. Jez Conolly's tales of growing up in Cleethorpes, the maudlin sadness of Bagpuss, watching queasy Schools and Colleges programmes while off sick from school, and the sheer horror of "laughing bags" and Blackpool's Doctor Who exhibition should be familiar to anyone from the Scarred For Life era.
—Stephen Brotherstone, author of Scarred For Life
 
Absolutely nails the shabby wonder of a twentieth century British childhood.
—Stephen Gallagher, screenwriter for Doctor Who and Silent Witness