There are no rules. Legal battles. Turning forty. A new singer. Sophomore slump. The seminal monster punk band takes all these ingredients and turns it into their best album ever.

A bold claim, but Famous Monsters backs it up. It’s the same great Misfits songwriting, now with modern production, a more expressive singer, and an even greater attention to melody and violence. Where Walk Among Us fired a machine gun at random, Famous Monsters takes precise aim and scores a perfect spread at a duly licensed gun-range because safety is important and these guys have Roth IRAs to manage now, doncha know.

Okay, the early spontaneity is missing, but the band sounds so good now it doesn’t matter. Doyle’s guttural guitars merge with Jerry’s bass to create a crushing bulldozer of sound, with Dr Chud’s drumming being downright inhuman(oid?). Replacement singer is Michale Graves is an astonishing find. His voice is rich and gleamingly smooth, like punk rock’s answer to Caruso. The band really should have worked harder to hold on to him.

The run of songs that starts from track 3 and finishes with track 7 is incredible, from the cruising power and energy of “Dust to Dust” and “Scream” to the coked-up thrashing of “Witch Hunt” and “Crawling Eye”, this is the stuff the Misfits are all about. Essential!

The later songs aren’t as strong, but they show the band’s more diverse side. Nobody these days knows how to mix punk with anything except ska and pop, but the Misfits would always convincingly combine their signature style with genres like NWOBHM and surf rock. Here we get a mini doo-wop epic called “Saturday Night”, and a plodding Cure-esque album closer called “Helena”

It has a few too many songs with few too little ideas, but that’s something you get used to with punk rock. Grognards will never accept any version of the band that doesn’t have Danzig behind the microphone, but everyone else will probably find Famous Monsters to be the strongest and most consistent Misfits album.

When you judge a book by its cover, you’ve got to be open to the chance of a mistrial. Phyl-Undhu’s title made me think it would be another attempt to stick electrodes on Lovecraft’s corpse and make him jump and dance for a few moments. Instead I got an extremely dense, detailed and scary story, with an excellent ending.

The story’s about a virtual-reality videogame that seems to take over peoples’ lives. Not through hypnosis or any sort of conventional addiction, but by being fascinating, confusing, and unsolvable.

None of the characters are sure how to beat it, they only know that they have to find “Phyl-Undhu”. The game is described as a massive environment that – like Stephen King’s Midworld – is both alien and very familiar. I liked Land’s invocation of apocalyptic size. That’s another nice touch often missed in horror stories about electronic games – a huge game like Skyrim can sometimes trick you into thinking it goes on forever, and that idea has a certain eerie power.

Playing the game occupies one corner of the story. The other corners are filled with philosophical fluff from Nick Land’s head, such as transhumanity, solipsism, and the “Fermi Paradox” (which questions why, in a universe replete with life’s building blocks, we’ve never seen signs of it anywhere except Earth). Many of these elements play into the larger story about the game, but in a way that doesn’t slow the momentum or drag things down.

The ending came and went, and it took a few moments for the full implications to sink in. I won’t spoil it, but it’s very, very good. Nick Land understands that a story’s end should NOT be the end, that it should take up residence in your mind and keep you thinking long after the pages go quiet.

I’m not very familiar with Nick Land, only knowing him as an “alt philosophy” person in the same category as Mencius Moldbug and Nick Bostrom. This is his first overt fictional work (as far as I know), although nothing he does can really be classified easily. In this case “futuristic philosophical horror” seems the closest fit, but it’s still a bad one. You’ll have to read for yourself.

Slinking between genres and hiding in the cracks of the Dewey Decimal System is Karin Tidbeck’s Jagannath. It has 13 stories. None of them straightforward, and all of them hard to classify. Whether they’re fantasy or horror or something else is up for debate – the point is, they don’t suck.

“Beatrice” is a steampunk romance featuring a man and a woman who are in love with (respectively) an airship and a steam locomotive. Tidbeck tweaks preconceptions by giving the male and female leads an utterly platonic relationship: it’s the machines that are the love interests. It’s difficult for a human to have a lover that needs oil changes, but the absurd premise doesn’t get in the way of the poignant ending.

“Pyret” is a brilliant piece of forged history that reminds of Bigfoot mythology combined with Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Though it’s written in a deliberately scholarly tone, it packs lots of emotional heft as we learn of a Swedish mythological creature that might not be mythological. Tidbeck has a talent for evoking pity and sympathy for the alien and monstrous.

“Jagannath” is a Noah’s ark story with a critical extra ingredient – the boat has a personality. In a desolate future, a couple of humans (or creatures that are similar to humans) must survive by travelling inside the belly of a gigantic “mother” that roams the barely-habitable landscape, looking for food. Again, a strange premise that the reader accepts uncritically on the strength of the writing.

There’s some shorter stories – some are less elaborate than others, but all of them are well conceived. “Cloudberry Jam” features a woman growing a child inside an empty jam tin. “Herr Cederberg” is about a man who wants to be a bumblebee. JG Ballard isn’t far from one’s mind when reading some of these – Tidbeck loves weirdos who get vindicated at the end.

Jagannath’s stories are screwy and weird, but they’re also disciplined exercises in storytelling efficiency. You can’t always see where a story’s going at first, but you quickly learn to relax, because you’re in good hands.