Here we have the central character, Norton, confined within the city limits
of London, but on a disturbing trajectory through history. From the playwright
Marlowe’s death via the shades of Dickens and Jack the Ripper to the bloody
dispatching of Jack the Hat, Norton traces a fantasy of London’s hidden
geography that has a visionary power between Blake and Coleridge’s opium-soaked
dreams. McKean provides the perfect visual corollary to Sinclair’s often
impenetrable but always mesmerising narrative.

Similarly, the “wormholes of memory” in Ciaran Carson’s The Star
Factory (Granta, ÂŁ13.99, ISBN 1862070725) are a conduit for a journey
through the author’s native Belfast, in which the divided city is often as
bizarre and unsettling as Sinclair’s London. Through autobiography, reportage
and a feast of other elements, Carson presents the divided city as a metaphor
for human uncertainty and hope, with the decaying landscape frequently a source
of poetic beauty. The prose is often rapturously inventive.

A heady traversing of space and time also defines Erica Wagner’s stories in
Gravity (Granta, ÂŁ9.99, ISBN 1860270822), a debut collection that
may vary in achievement, but often grips with an intensity rarely found these
days. The title story, in particular, is a gem. In an observatory, an astronomer
comes to terms with the terrors of a modular universe, and the colliding of
sexuality and horror is given a cosmic dimension in Wagner’s lucid prose. If
some stories have less intensity, that could be said to be part of the book’s
game plan. There’s a prodigious talent at work here.

If uncertainty about our place in the scheme of history is one of the main
concerns in modern fiction, the other is unquestionably an uneasy attitude to
identity. And Charles de Lint, an expert chronicler of the strange underpinnings
of contemporary society, manages to explore the latter idea in Trader
(Macmillan, ÂŁ16.99, ISBN 0333672127) without ever losing the format of a
bizarre and compelling thriller. The lifeshift between the respected craftsman
Max Trader and the drunken, unemployed Johnny Devlin is handled with de Lint’s
customary skill.

With Siberian Light by Robin White (Michael Joseph,
£9.99/$16.77, ISBN 071814287X), we’re in the fashionable thriller
territory of Miss Smilla and her snow, the temperature lowered even further by a
soupçon of Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park. But the
reader’s temperature is kept satisfyingly warm with the investigation of a
brutal triple murder. Here we have an ecologist using (plausibly) scientific
extrapolation to expose old horrors of Siberia’s past. OK, we’ve been here
before, but White is adroit at ringing the changes, and there’s a canny
manipulation of tension leading to a very well-turned climax.

The controversy over The Speed Queen by Stewart O’Nan (Viking,
£9.99/$21.95, ISBN 067087549X) revolves around the author’s use of
a celebrated horror writer to chronicle the death-row thoughts of a woman in an
Oklahoma prison after a drug-fuelled killing spree. The fact that O’Nan
identifies his horror writer as Stephen King has attracted the attention of
King’s lawyers. O’Nan draws less on his own aerospace background than on Oliver
Stone-style observations about the synergy between mass technology and a
fastfood culture of casual violence. But he’s a skilled writer, and the
hand-me-down elements are blended into a cocktail that has a not inconsiderable
kick.

With Joseph Kanon’s Los Alamos (Abacus, £15.99/$25,
ISBN 0316640018), we find ourselves in the high security confines of the
Manhattan Project in the final days of the Second World War—and such is
Kanon’s skill at recreating this universe, that a security guard’s affectionate
listing of his charges as “Oppie, Fermi, Bethe and co” doesn’t strike the reader
as at all forced.

Robert Oppenheimer is strikingly characterised—and in a smart and
intelligently realised novel like Kanon’s, the reader is happy to buy this
version of the man, almost regardless of how accurate it may be.

The reader identification with this world of highly supervised scientists
(given to adolescent pranks as a way of rebelling against the super-strict
security) is adroitly channelled through Connolly, the liaison officer sent to
investigate the possibly homosexual murder of one of the camp’s security
personnel.

Ian McEwan makes an intriguing choice of profession for the central character
of his latest novel, Enduring Love (Cape, ÂŁ15.95, 0224050311):
he’s a popular science journalist. McEwan’s own fascination with this area is
well known, but he gives his hero a wistful longing for a hard science career
now abandoned. As before with McEwan, it’s the clever activation of popularised
concepts that give the kick-start to his thriller-like narrative: here a tale of
obsession—possibly sexual, but somehow more complex—is decorated
with Darwinian and humanist perspectives.

As ever McEwan delivers the page-turning goods, although a grisly balloon
set-piece at the start is rather dissipated in a dry case-history
ending—even Hitchcock couldn’t quite bring this device off. Still, it’s
McEwan’s most compulsive novel since The Innocent.

Stephen Dobyns’s The Church of Dead Girls(Viking/Penguin,
ÂŁ9.99, ISBN 0670877425) is a cleverly constructed book which marries
several familiar elements: the small town under whose calm surface sexual and
other tensions simmer; the psychotic character whose minor acts of mayhem
foreshadow a possible homicide; and a neutral narrator who knows just about
enough about the protagonists to speculate on who is behind the killings. We
also have an intellectual guru. In this case, he is a Marxist professor at the
local college who may or may not be a catalyst for extreme actions in his
impressionable students.

Dobyns successfully stirs these elements into a fresh brew, but the cool tone
he endows on his narrator doesn’t always pay dividends. Is it intended that the
scientific approach and detachment leave grisly horrors—the handless
stumps of murder victims, for instance—narrated in a reined-in prose which
sometimes neutralises the charge? But the town’s undercurrents are conveyed with
intelligence and subtlety, with the growing “murder next door” paranoia cannily
accelerated. The unlikeable teenage students—one of whom is a memorable
sociopath given to Tysonesque biting attacks—are strikingly painted.

Are our identities increasingly defined by information held on computers and
ever-more-sophisticated surveillance? Ron McKay muses thus through The Leper
Colony (Gollancz, ÂŁ9.99, ISBN 0575064749). A Glasgow-set search by a
son for the truth about his family, this is tough and involving . . . As is
David Ambrose’s ingenious story of experiments with the power of the mind,
Superstition(Macmillan, ÂŁ16.99, ISBN 0333682645). His sequences
involving the “creation” of a ghost have a genuine charge.

Finally, a welcome return to form for William Gibson with Idoru now
out in paperback (Penguin, ÂŁ6.99/$6.99, ISBN 0140241078, reviewed
in hardback 23 November, 1996), a heady cocktail of psychic netrunners and
virtual media stars in a bizarre Japanese setting.

Beginning with misconfigured computers, wayward shipments and sales division
cockups in a Texan manufacturer of PCs, Franklet soon has us enjoying a lively
head-to-head between the troubleshooter at Simtec and a team of ruthless
consultants led by one Hektor (Simtec is Troy, electronic breaching is the
Trojan horse . . . you get the idea.) The stakes, of course, soon involve
corporate America, not to mention the hero’s wife and daughter.

Franklet himself has been a top computer troubleshooter, which speaks well
for the technical detail, but is this another “great detail, shame about the
writing” scenario? It’s encouraging to report that the plotting here is very
skilfully handled, as is the characterisation, so there’s a genuine involvement
in the convoluted plot mechanisms. A compelling and lively debut.

Quite a different kettle of genetically modified fish is Andrew Harman’s
witty and prodigiously inventive A Midsummer Night’s Gene (Legend, £4.99,
ISBN 0 09 978881 0), in which the cringe-making pun of the title is bracingly
apotheosised in a Pratchettesque spin on the more bizarre byways of
laboratory-engineered mutation. At the Splice of Life Patentable Biosciences Ltd
labs (yes, yes, all the wordplay is designed to make your teeth ache), Professor
Crickson is about to unite carnivores and vegetarians by implanting the taste of
chicken into the genetic patterns of corn. Like his oven-bake sushi and
microwavable steak tartare, this bids fair to be a market winner, but Harman
wouldn’t be able to create comic chaos unless something went badly wrong.

And this involves what looks like industrial espionage, but moves into very
weird territory (abduction by creatures that almost defy description, new DNA
strands turning up in the amniotic tanks), giving the outrageous Harman a chance
to display some unassumingly impressive literary references alongside the verbal
fireworks and manic plotting. At times, a little more discipline might have kept
the momentum of the narrative a little less stop-and-start, but that seem a
trifle churlish in light of the fun on offer here.

Scientific rationalism applied to a subject not usually approached from this
point of view usually throws up stimulating results. Jim Crace’s take on the New
Testament in Quarantine (Viking, ÂŁ16.99, ISBN 0 670 85697 5) is a real
treat for the reader, even if it creates problems for a reviewer because it
depends so much on highly ingenious revelations for its incidental
pleasures.

Suffice it to say that Crace’s clear-eyed narrative of Christ’s fasts in the
Judean desert 2000 years ago is bound to upset the pious (generally something a
challenging writer should do as a matter of course), while not entirely
dispensing with the mysteries of faith. There’s a hint behind Crace’s
customarily elegant prose that his research for the book has resulted in some
surprising conclusions for the sceptic that Crace himself clearly is. Assured
and original, although there are echoes of Michael Moorcock’s classic Behold
the Man.

The fragility of knowledge in the face of tyranny is the theme of Hong Ying’s
Summer of Betrayal (Bloomsbury, ÂŁ14.99, ISBN 0 7475 3249 4), with a young
woman poet surviving the massacre in Tiananmen Square only to undergo a painful
odyssey in pursuit of truth through, among other things, sexual freedom and
erotic liberation. If the sexual passages guarantee a ready narrative grip,
there’s still an unyielding intelligence at work here.

Jonathan Coe’s The House of Sleep (Viking, £17, ISBN 0 670
86458 7) is not a comforting book. Its principal setting is a clinic for sleep
disorders, during 1983 and 1984 and the present, and has a cast of damaged,
alienated individuals. Less overtly political than the remarkable What a
Carve Up (although Coe makes cutting points about government handling of
education issues), this absorbing novel could be seen, via its narcoleptic
heroine Sarah, as a metaphor for Britain’s sleepwalking state for the past 17
years. The wit is as sharp as before, even if the earlier book is a more solid
achievement.

Another novel in which readers are rarely allowed to relax into any sense
that they’re on a guided tour of the best of all possible worlds is Michael
Marshall Smith’s compellingly off-kilter Spares (HarperCollins,
ÂŁ9.99, ISBN 0 00 224656 2). Marshall Smith is a chronicler of unease, with
a vision of the world that regards scientific advance as both a threat to our
humanity and a shiny, comic bauble. But he’s no luddite. His hero Randall is a
survivor precisely because he knows the score and can turn all the vicissitudes
of his society, a skewed version of the one we live in, to his advantage. While
Randall tries to sell 28 gigs of RAM, survive a contract on his life and
investigate a murder, he encounters pleasingly realised conceits such as a
talking computer that gabbles maniacally about the viruses it is stamping on.
The eponymous spares are both what the reader expects and a totally original
concept, cannily delayed by Marshall Smith. This is a witty, hard-edged and
corruscatingly imaginative piece.

An agenda seems to lurk behind Simon Maginn’s Methods of Confinement
(Black Swan, ÂŁ6.99, ISBN 0 522 99708 0), an examination and critique of
society’s treatment of the mentally ill. This is signalled by rubrics above the
chapters describing the barbaric treatments handed out throughout history to
those adjudged mad. At the end of this straightforwardly gripping psychological
thriller, with blood-spattered mayhem marking the climax, I had the unworthy
thought that Maginn had indulged in intellectual window dressing. His earlier
books such as Virgin and Martyrs were more complex and ambitious.

But as a novel of menace, Methods of Confinement is sterling stuff,
with a young couple suffering through their childlessness and taking into their
home a disturbed young man as a kind of surrogate child. More problematic than
Maginn’s intentions is the massive suspension of disbelief required to accept
that the characters would lay themselves open to the clearly unstable Declan,
whatever their own difficulties. There are felicities: the young husband Luke’s
adoption of the status of doppelgänger to his dangerous guest is
handled with skill. But is this a Hammer psychothriller or an attempt at
something more complex?

The title of Paul Wilson’s Do White Whales Sing at the Edge of the
World? (Granta, ÂŁ15.99, ISBN 1 86207 035 0) suggests an author at
risk of poetic preciousness. Happily, he isn’t. This powerful novel’s central
character, Gabriel Emerson, has experienced a traumatising act of collective
violence as a child during the Second World War in the Cumbrian town of Lang. As
an adult, Gabriel is mute and amnesiac, living in a colony for the feeble-minded
in the fells. As the colony faces closure, Gabriel undertakes an extraordinary
journey with three other residents: without leaving the institution, he
re-enacts his namesake Emerson’s controversial discovery of the Northwest
Passage. The experience is transfiguring. Wilson handles his haunting tale with
consummate skill.

Finally, two unusual and ingenious novels that are interestingly offbeat: Pat
Dillon’s The Last Best Thing (Simon & Schuster, £15.99, ISBN
0 684 83614 9) is a sharp version of the secret history of Silicon Valley, wry
and fast-moving—ignore the ill-judged illustrations. Jon Stephen Fink’s
If He Lived (Jonathan Cape, ÂŁ9.99, ISBN 0 224 04362 5) is a
contemporary ghost story, graced with a rational take on its supernatural
happenings.

Two recent novels go to intriguing lengths to unite thriller elements and
heady scientific speculation.

Ruth Brandon’s The Uncertainty Principle (Jonathan Cape,
ÂŁ15.99, ISBN 0 224 04454 0) has a fascinating story line in which the
heroine, having seen her dead daughter in a Los Angeles shopping mall,
undertakes a search that involves time travel and parallel universes. Brandon
makes some cogent scientific observations, and renders her characters, Helen and
her New Age physics-oriented husband, totally plausible.

Sanjida O’Connell makes a chilling debut in Theory of Mind (Black
Swan, ÂŁ6.99, ISBN 0 552 99709 9). While researching the behaviour of
chimps, O’Connell’s heroine becomes preoccupied with the increasingly aggressive
moods of a colleague working on predatory robots. The novel is one of real
distinction which does full justice to her skills in behavioural science.

But what happens when subjects such as AIDS and abortion enter the arena of
the page-turning thriller?

InDiagnosis: Terminal—an Anthology of Medical Terror (Forge,
$23.95, ISBN 0 312 85972 4) F. Paul Wilson is usually canny enough to
know when he’s in danger of treading on our sensibilities and careful enough to
ensure that a knowledgeable readership will find the medical and scientific
details in the tales well-researched. Bill Pronzini’s “Angel of mercy” has a
period setting, a psychotic healer and a parade of hilariously inept medical
remedies from an earlier age. Abortion is the story’s central theme but
fascinating medical detail provides a climax which is gripping enough to prevent
the reader dwelling on ethics. Ridley Pearson’s “All over but the dying” has
AIDS as its subject. His plot, however, may be too slender for the weightiness
of its subject matter. The result is uncomfortable. The same feeling is
engendered, for different reasons, by the late Karl Edward Wagner’s “Final
cut”—seemingly a version of his own impending death.

The late Paul Monette has delivered, as he always did, a stylishly written
tale in Afterlife (Abacus, ÂŁ6.99, ISBN 0 349 10772 6). Humanity
and risk come together with AIDS as the central theme and familiar fingerprints
such as the deliciously cruel attack on homophobic TV evangelists. A strong
book, even if not Monette’s best.

Margaret Atwood in Alias Grace (Bloomsbury, ÂŁ15.99, ISBN 0
7475 2787 3) actively embraces exploration of a moral dilemma in the field of
mind and medicine. Her tale of convicted murderess Grace Marks, set in 1840s
Toronto, deals with the investigation into her case by a young expert in mental
health and amnesia. As Grace’s early life, including her liaisons with her
executed lover and a murdered couple, is unravelled, sexuality and the
constraints placed on women in this era are handled with both steadiness and
panache. Atwood uses perceptions of the period to describe the scientific
delving into Grace’s personality. The mosaic structure of the novel mirrors the
fragmentation of the unconscious mind. Repression of sexual and violent energy
leads to a denouement more powerful than many a more eventful novel.

There is no shortage of sophistication and moral complexity in any of these
books, qualities which are fundamental to suspense in all fiction. Ultimately,
of course, readers will decide for themselves whether any of them go too far in
their quest for a narrative thrill.

Starting his first-person narrative in media res, Kellerman follows a grisly encounter with a shark by sending Delaware on an all-expenses-paid trip to the tiny pacific island of Aruk, where the elusive scientist William Moreland has asked him to help in the analysis of the medical records of the islanders. But Delaware is soon distracted by a brutal murder, and evidence begins to emerge of a technological development of environment-threatening proportions.

Of course, we’re in familiar waters here – science as bogeyman, the impulse that drives so many thrillers. But where would the source of menace be otherwise? And with Kellerman it’s invariably human corruption manipulating scientific developments for specific ends. Either way, he keeps any qualms about such things at bay.

It comes as absolutely no surprise to learn that Audrey Schulman’s The Cage (Phoenix, £5.99, ISBN 1 85799 259 8) has been optioned for the screen. The uncharitable might think it had been constructed for that very purpose. Certainly, the prose is brisk and, seemingly, penny-plain. But Schulman’s no-nonsense approach points up the freshness of her narrative: an otherwise all-male expedition to the Arctic has one female member, the photographer Beryl. Her diminutive size allows her to enter the eponymous cage and photograph polar bears close up. As the high-tech survival gear begins to fail, Beryl’s relationship to the watching bears acquires a new significance. If Schulman is less than convincing in conveying the interpersonal tensions of the team, she has a canny grasp of plotting and incident that shows why the movie money-men sensed a winner here.

Is there anyone today writing novels like Carl Hiaasen? Well, since Richard Condon lost his way, no. The black and phantasmagorical comedy of Condon’s thrillers finds a perfect nineties corollary in Hiaasen’s bizarre, fractured and sharply funny portraits of his beloved southern Florida. As a cyclone wreaks havoc, Stormy Weather (Macmillan, £15.99, ISBN 0 333 63774 7) bids fair to be the author’s most surrealistic vision yet, with a Ballardian landscape of flying reptiles and the detritus of modern society re-jigged into a canvas by a latter-day Bosch. The inverted logic of a corrupt and wounded society convinces the reader – more so than the Madison Avenue adman hero, dragging his naive wife through the chaos, and some over-schematic cutting between the large and disparate cast. But it’s still a heady cocktail, studded with sharp details – such as the woman desperate to sleep with a Kennedy – any Kennedy – and an encounter with a very minor offshoot of that clan.

Simon & Schuster, the publishers of Martin Booth’s Adrift in the Oceans of Mercy (£15.99, ISBN 0 684 81651 2) are at pains to point out that this is a literary novel, no doubt afraid that mainstream readers might be frightened off by the science fiction premise (a lone astronaut struggles for survival in the disintegrating space station Mir IV). But their worries were misplaced. Those who know Booth’s sensitive prose from earlier novels like Hiroshima Joe will expect the writing here to have gravitas – even if the novel’s locale lacks gravity. Booth conducts a sophisticated examination of the human spirit in terms that would not disgrace a more Booker-friendly novel, but located in the context of the technological wonders of a Stanislav Lem universe.

Fertility affecting drugs and genetic selection are the core elements of two more novels. Liz Jensen’s Egg Dancing (Bloomsbury, £5.99, ISBN 0 7475 2402 5) comes with a Fay Weldon encomium, and Weldon is the presiding influence on Jensen’s witty black comedy. But Weldon herself has thoroughly mined this territory. The malevolent centre of Peter James’s Alchemist (Gollancz, £15.99, ISBN 0 575 05726 2) is a drug called Maternox. But, unlike Jensen, he introduces a supernatural element to create a characteristically grim and involving chiller.

While Acceptable Risk by Robin Cook (Macmillan, £15.99, ISBN 0 333 64223 6) doesn’t show the prince of the medical thriller at full stretch, it still has the seeming effortlessness of all his work, with a central idea that is fresh as paint. Cook’s present-day narrative opens with a prologue set in 1692, with Salem in the grip of the witch hunts. The hanging of an ancestor of Kim, the modern-day heroine, leads to her involvement with a charismatic medical scientist creating a Prozac-like antidepressant drug, Ultra. The twist is that the accusers of the Salem witches are found to have been under the influence of a lysergic acid derivative – and when Ultra proves to have disastrous side effects, Cook’s orchestration of mayhem is given full rein. Cook even at less than full throttle is still better value than his imitators. The scientific and medical detail, as usual, consists of the highly implausible rendered with maximum plausibility.

Hypertrophic drugs also propel the action of Elizabeth Nickson’s The Monkey-Puzzle Tree (Bloomsbury, £5.99 pbk, ISBN 0 747 52038 0), but the fanciful conceits of Cook’s novel are here replaced by a sober narrative of CIA mind-control skulduggery, made all the more chilling by the autobiographical basis of the plot. Nickson’s mother was given to high levels of LSD and other mind-altering drugs in clandestine experiments conducted on unwitting psychiatric patients. Her decision to portray her mother’s ordeal in a fictionalised form pays dividends, principally because Nickson skilfully balances the demands of a murky conspiracy plot with the sympathetically handled story of a young girl’s fraught relationship with her erratic mother. As with Cook, it’s the personal that acts as a motor for the thriller mechanics of the tale.

The uneasy marriage of science and witchcraft effected by Robin Cook is given another spin in Theodore Roszak’s The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein (Random House, £22, ISBN 0 679 43732 0), which, like Cook, gives a feminist perspective on the persecution of witches. Roszak’s intriguing premise – Mary Shelley’s tale of scientific overreaching retold from the perspective of Frankenstein’s hapless bride, Elizabeth – is handled with some panache, particularly in scenes depicting the doomed lovers as children. The sado-masochistic games, prefiguring the later experiments, and the portrayal of Elizabeth as a rebellious spirit rather than swooning victim, all act as an intriguing preamble to the encounter with the Creature. But problems set in with Roszak’s imitation of Shelley’s 19th-century prose style: the selfconscious, knowing authorial intelligence makes for an uneasy piece of ventriloquism. Still, the momentum of the narrative makes it easy to enjoy a cleverly crafted and witty riff on Shelley.

The shade of James Joyce has a lot to answer for in Phil O’Brien’s Memories of the Irish Israeli War (New Futurist, £7.99 pbk, ISBN 1 899 69000 X) a phantasmagorical tale of urban terrorism set in a fractured future/present. Some splenetically inventive Joycean wordplay virtually obliterates the narrative of a feisty Belfast waitress plotting Semtex atrocities with her demented Syrian, Lebanese, Egyptian and Israeli cohorts. There’s a real comic gift at work here, as well as a heady delight in the possibilities of language. But only the most patient of readers is likely to make much headway through O’Brien’s hectic prose.

Stephen Wright’s Going Native (Abacus, £8.99 pbk, ISBN 0 349 10577 4) comes with the blessing of Don Delillo. It’s easy to see why this exhilarating rollercoaster ride through a world of serial killers, drug addicts and other exotic blooms of urban lowlife appealed to Delillo: there’s the same nervous energy and coruscating poetry in the language. What makes the descent of Wright’s disenchanted middle-class hero, Wylie, into a world of pornographers and psychotic hitch-hikers so striking is the deliberate marginalising of Wylie in the grim world he observes – a shadowy interloper in a latter-day inferno. Verdict? Unmissable.