With the world undergoing disastrous disintegration from man-made causes, who better to bring together the man-made solutions than three female clones as damaged and traumatised and dysfunctional as the world they're supposed to save? Most of their sisters are dead, their mother/sister is out of reach from the forces of law and order in orbit and the four surviving clones are scattered over the world, engaged in various morally dubious projects of reclamation, amelioration, sterilisation and terrorism. One man sets out to bring them together and hopes by doing so to mend the ideological divisions hampering the task of global salvation.

Well, I liked it. Sterling is too optimistic to let the world die screaming, but too much of a realist to make survival easy pr cost free. The clones are like a fractured human psyche, half-mad and self-hating, to the extent that getting anything useful other than tragedy and heartbreak out of them seems impossible. Whether they succeed, and whether Sterling succeeds, is for the reader to decide.

A second collection from Laird Barron, more tales to gouge your world out and then hold the dripping world out on the end of its talons and wave it at the universe and ask if anything wants a snack and a billion disgusting filthy things start shuffling hungrily forward.

More great writing, and a greater variety of protagonists to fall prey to the slow erosion of sanity and reality as Barron mythos grows and infects yet more settings and locales and transforms more doomed and hapless humans into food or feeders. Gay lovers, bereaved mothers, retired surveyors, scientists and married couples, all grist to the horror mill.

The stories themselves are disquieting, disturbing, and disgusting enough to churn the stomach but draws enough veils to churn the mind. Your heart will break and your mind will revolt at the terrible fates of many of these characters, but you'll be glad it isn't you.

Fun little novella. Hap and Leonard set out to provide some moral guidance to a wayward youth and end up killing a lot of guys to male their point. It's surprisingly heartwarming and life-affirming. The little short story at the end is a chilling tale of bullying, hurt and exclusion leading to a dreadful outcome.

Exquisitely disturbing and ultimately horrible tale about an unconventional couple on a journey down the Amazon that seems to recur across time. Brilliantly written, entirely unsettling and grotesquely distasteful. Messes with your head and your stomach.

Five great stories by Straub. A jazz guru, a noir nightmare, cartoon family skullduggery, a mysterious murder and a weird clinic - brilliantly written, witty, intelligent, strange and haunting. Straub's stories are often like puzzles, some of which reveal themselves by the end, others of which leave you wondering for days, and some of which are just downright ineffable.

This seems to be a flipside novella, laying out a roughly similar premise to Cold In July of an ordinary family man enlisting help to go after some very bad people. It's most notable feature the amazingly terrifying Booger, a pure murderous sociopathic killer, who is also one of the good guys. It's very good, but not as full-on, either in terms of emotions or violence, as you might expect. Though it has its moments.

Once a year, at the very least, one likes to sit down and imbibe a long slow shot of Ross Thomas, and feel cultured and clever and civilised for a while. This tale of a campaign organiser brought back from bucolic farm life to look into the disappearance of a union boss leads to a murderous political conspiracy to scupper the upcoming US elections. But who is behind it and is there anyone he can trust? The skullduggery of union politics from high-level power plays to low-level violence and intimidation all feature in this delightfully nasty and poisonous but smooth and powerful little thriller. Drink it slow, there's a bite on every sip.

Conrad Navarro is the ur-Barron protagonist. Not merely macho, he's so damn macho he fights in a secret death tournaments for a living, and he's probably a genius and an artist too, if he ever put his mind to it. When not twisting limbs off animals and men for the entertainment of depraved rich folk he hunts the world for his vanished sister, an FBI agent obsessed with finding the man who probably murdered their brother. The hunt is peeling back a few layers of the world and reality best left undisturbed, but Conrad is too far along the road to hell to turn back now.

Beautiful writing, glamorous locations, seedy squalor, monstrous experiments and dark hungry gods living amongst us - Barron blends it all together into a heady and frightful brew. It's all fantastically hard-boiled and grand guignol and soul-laceratingly cosmic, exactly what you'd hope for in a Laird Barron novella.

The fall of the Republic and the rise of the Empire, not that Rome wasn't already an Empire when the Republic fell. Built on slavery, it celebrated liberty, but how could you appreciate liberty without lots of slaves deprived of their liberty to contrast with your? Such was the mindset of the Romans, according to this immensely readable book, and it is one of a number of paradoxes that fueled the Roman's drive to take over the world, usually with thinly justified pre-emptive strikes against anyone who was even vaguely threatening or disrespectful, then robbing and enslaving and squeezing the survivors unmercifully, creating enormous wealth and opportunities for corruption. Which was, to the Roman mind, as it should be.

I admit my sense of the history of Rome is vague and spotty, filled with cinematic and televisual pageantry rather than a solid conception of its general shape. Still, so much of this is familiar, so many names echoing out of the past, and it's nice to have it brought more sharply into focus. Extraordinary men rise and do extraordinary things to great praise and adulation, then the extraordinary men are brought low, because Rome loves extraordinary men, it just doesn't like them. A swirling vortex of rising and falling leads almost inevitably to chaos and anarchy and a brutal and deadly struggle. The story is often garish and lurid and unimaginably brutal and violent. It's also fascinating and compelling. Holland creates a driving narrative, and while one is automatically suspicious of narratives imposed on history, still it grabs the attention and does not let go.

With the world in their pockets and the stars in their reach, the mad, bad scientists of the Manhattan Projects take bold new steps into the future - rockets and bio-sciences and fuels, and one secret project the Oppenheimer isn't talking about except among himselves. But there's an alien in their midst and the US government that doesn't like Commies and Nazis in their science soup. Depraved science and scientific violence and psychic civil war in a scientist's head all rage, and that poor little dog boldly going where no dog has gone before. This comic does more or less the same.