Beautifully brief and interconnected insights into the thoughts and lives of 252 tube passengers and their driver, rumbling towards an increasingly inevitable crash. Quiet revelations on the nature of mourning, as well; that it’s their last moment of decision that gets you (or got me), rather than the descriptions of the deaths at the end…

Oddly abstract, and slightly weaker than his others; a simple fable of gradually undermined isolation, creeping into the symbolic realms of religion.

Patchy short stories – some excellent ideas, but the actual stories tend to be weak, and only a couple of the twist endings work.

But the Cthulhian London Underground tale is absolutely perfect, in tone and shape and minor detail. Worth reading just for that.

Better than I’d hoped – the “student missing whilst playing an online treasure hunt game” isn’t too badly researched, and only an excuse for detectives to solve riddles and crossword clues. Lots of the usual wry dialogue, grim weather and dissection of Edinburgh – a bit over-long, but not a bad read.

Recommended by someone (Dunx?) years ago, and the line about corporate buildings being designed to suprahuman scale really stuck with me. A neat conflation of Great Old Ones and faceless corporations, with an unhinged narrator losing loved ones to The System. Doesn’t quite live up to its potential, though, and is appallingly typeset.

A great little book on surviving the streets and pavements of London, with a lot of generalised psychogeographic fun; new ways to view city streets, and games to play in traffic. Includes an origami random-walk generator that predates any others I’ve heard of.

Characters telling each other meandering stories on the nature of free will, watched over by a narrator who constantly threatens to derail the story, but chooses not to, or can’t, and also interrupts to argue with the reader.

Excellent account of grim, optimistic squalor and how closely it stands behind the middle classes. Very good for destroying all appetite.

Great collection of Araucaria’s Guardian crosswords, starting well and getting suddenly terrifying and obscure. Useful practice; good to have the answers within reach.

There’s a disappointing lack of introduction, context or even publication dates, though – just 100 crosswords.

A darker and more hallucinogenically paranoid Truman Show; some atrophied tangents and a somewhat let-down ending, but otherwise good.