Troll: A Love Story by Johanna Sinisalo, translated by Herbert Lomas (Pushkin, £9.99)
Outside his apartment block, behind the bins, a young man known as Angel finds a sick, abandoned troll cub. Seized by the desire to raise it as his pet, he smuggles it indoors and sets out to learn all he can about trolls. In the world of this prize-winning Finnish novel, trolls are not creatures of legend but a rare species, the result of convergent evolution. Keeping such a dangerous animal is illegal, and Angel doesn’t know what to feed it or how to cure it. He turns to the clientele of his local gay bar for help: lying, breaking hearts, seducing a veterinarian in order to steal his drugs. For such a short novel, Troll covers a lot of ground; it’s told through various viewpoints, and bolstered by invented sources ranging from folk tales to scientific papers. As well as a queer love story, it’s a reflection on the distance between man and animal, and modern city life versus nature. Published in English 20 years ago as Not Before Sundown, this new edition is sure to thrill another generation of readers.
How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later by Philip K Dick (Isolarii, £14.95)
In 1978, still struggling to make sense of a religious experience from 1974 and to start an overdue novel, Dick produced this essay, which includes reflections on writing science fiction, Christianity and his two great obsessions: what is reality, and what does it mean to be human. Written as a speech that he probably never gave and first published in a posthumous collection in 1985, it offers a fascinating glimpse into the mind of one of the most influential American writers of the late 20th century. His warning that “we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated mechanisms” feels increasingly urgent today. Published as a miniature pocketbook, it’s provocative, funny, scary and thought-provoking – essential reading.
The Woman Who Fell to Earth by RB Russell (Tartarus, £40)
Tanya is woken in the night by the sound of something hitting the roof: this turns out to be the dead body of her old friend Catherine. How it got there is a mystery left unsolved by police and media, but when Tanya learns she has inherited Catherine’s house, crammed full of books, files and stacks of old newspapers, she is drawn deeper into the pursuit of the truth, and into the world of the occult. A rare book dealer has stolen some of Catherine’s more valuable possessions, including a mysterious artefact called the Sixtystone, which featured in a novel by Arthur Machen, and Tanya sets out on an increasingly strange journey to try to recover it. The biographer of Robert Aickman and founding member of the Friends of Arthur Machen society has produced a modern, wonderfully strange story that admirers of both those earlier authors should love.
Mystery Lights by Lena Valencia (Dead Ink, £10.99)
The horror in this debut collection of stories is subtle but effective. Apart from cave-dwelling cryptids in one story and ghosts in others, supernatural elements are slight; our fear for the female characters arises from their ordinary lives, in family relationships or encounters with strangers. The stories are beautifully written, with believable characters in vividly described American settings – from a snow-bound college dorm to a wellness retreat in the Mojave desert – and all are shot through with unease and a streak of strangeness that makes them outstanding.
