I don't think I've read any proper full-on horror for a while now, so I was slightly unprepared for this modern vision of the universe as a dripping maw crunching manly protagonists in its masticating jaws with sharp, crooked, yellow, teeth made of squirming star-stuff, the gore of its screaming meal dripping over a chin like a mountain made of night and maggots. And so on.

This stuff is brilliant, pure, mind-bending brilliance. Conceptually, there's a debt to Lovecraft, but there's something way more physical and pervasive about the monsters in this mythos, chased down by amoral hard-boiled protagonists who usually don't like what they find but keep searching just to end the nightmares. So crime and westerns and the more literary horrors of Straub and McCarthy are in evidence here as well.

There's lots of incredible, vivid, writing with an eye for detail and sudden unsettling swerves of imagery. Hard to pick a favourite, but I loved the swaggering, cynical Pinkerton man in Bulldozer, and the garish horror tableau of the opening of Hallucigenia, and its apotheosis at the end. Weakest was The Royal Zoo Is Closed. Brilliant writing, an encapsulation of post-millennial urban angst, but it doesn't have a story, or not much of a one, and it's the sheer meatiness of the stories that marks out all the rest of this collection. Great stuff, overall. Fantastic to find a new (to me) writer working at this level.