THE STRANGEST book I’ve read this year, and one of the most transfixing, is You Again by Debra Jo Immergut (Titan, £8.99).

It features in-house corporate illustrator Abby, who lives in New York with her husband and teenage sons. Middle-aged, a bit tired and a bit bored, she and her husband both started out as artists but life happened to them and now they have “proper” jobs.

It’s not a disagreeable existence at all but then Abby starts to see herself around town. It’s not someone reminiscent of her, it’s actually her, aged 22. Quite apart from the disturbing impossibility of the situation, there’s the dilemma: should she approach her old self? And if she does, what should she tell her?

In appropriately painterly prose, Immergut uses a solidly science-fiction concept to explore how we all get from who we were to where we are.

In The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez (Titan, £8.99), Nia is the captain of a cargo spaceship in a future dominated by a single, interplanetary corporation.

The nature of space travel means that the months she spends on her ship are decades to the people on the planets she visits. Therefore, youthful lovers are re-encountered in their dotage and people she meets once in their teens are middle-aged when she next greets them.

During one such stopover, she becomes responsible for the safety of a mysterious, stateless child, whose secret will dominate not just Nia’s life but perhaps everyone else’s.

This remarkable debut novel is essentially a story about love and heartbreak rather than technology, while still fully satisfying from a pure sf point of view. If this is a sign of things to come, Jimenez could be a huge writer.

If Captain Swing or the Parisian Communards had written haunted-house novels, they might have dreamt up something like Thirteen Storeys by Jonathan Sims (Gollancz, £16.99).

Its villain, billionaire Tobias Fell, has only contempt for those who of his peers who shed crocodile tears. He prefers to embrace capitalism without illusions: it is a system designed to make a small number very rich and this must necessarily mean the suffering of millions of others. To feel guilty about that would be as sentimental and illogical as taking pleasure in it.

It is simply the price to be paid for his success. A price, of course, paid by others.

Fell lives as a recluse in the penthouse of a block of flats he owns in Tower Hamlets and we know from the first page that it is also where he dies, violently and inexplicably, while hosting a bizarre dinner party.

How were the guests, none of them known to their host, selected? That’s what the novel tells us — that, and what they’re doing there.

Frightening and at the same time rousing, this is a compellingly mysterious story, with — so rare in horror fiction — an entirely satisfactory conclusion. This is surely the sort of purpose Mary Shelley would have wished the genre to be put to when she invented it.