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.

Memoirs are normally published by “has-beens”. This is a memoir by a “never-was” – one of the hundred thousand (mostly jobless) actors prowling for casting calls in the greater Los Angeles area.

Scott Palmer’s closest brush with fame was his appearance in the surrealist Adult Swim series Tim and Eric: Awesome Show, Great Job!, where he performed a skit about sitting on people. In this book, he talks about T&E as well as his adventures in things like car ownership, playing on Win Ben Stein’s Money, and generally being a not-even-on-the-alphabet-lister in Hollywood.

The book’s quite short, but it’s interesting, if only because Palmer has no interest in the usual structure of the book and fills it with all sorts of bizarre asides that probably wouldn’t have survived the red pen of an editor (to the book’s credit). He’s very candid and refreshing.

As Tim Heidecker said in a reddit AMA, they cast the show using traditional channels – but rather than the top of the pack, they use the bottom, as suits the show’s off-kilter aesthetic. As a result, they’ve collected an entourage of some truly bizarre actors – such as David Liebe Hart and James Quall, who are obviously a few sixpacks short of a beer. Exploitation? Maybe. These guys are all SAG members, getting paid the standard scale, aware that the show is a comedy, etc. To what extent they’re “in” on the T&E joke is debatable, but it’s not like they’ve been dragged from a psyche ward and shoved in front of a camera.

Is Palmer another guy like Quall and Liebe Hart? It’s hard to tell. There’s some signs that he doesn’t get what T&E is about (he complains that in the “I sit on you” sketch they used a take where he sings slightly flat), but again, he seems basically aware of what he’s doing. The way he tells it is that he’s pretty much a minder for Quall and Liebe Hart – helping them find their way around, keeping them out of trouble, etc.

Unfortunately, there’s often a lot of trouble, and Palmer falls prey to it as much as anybody. After multiple donation drives online, he’s had to retire from acting. A 9 to 5 career is not sympatico with last-minute casting calls. This is regrettable, but inevitable. Silliness is always transient and short-lasting, otherwise it’s insanity or manipulative calculation masquerading as silliness. Best of luck to Palmer in whatever he does after this, I guess.

It’s always interesting to see how people react when their main claim to fame is something odd or embarrassing. Peter Mayhew played Chewbacca. Doesn’t matter what else he did, doesn’t matter what else he wants to do. They might as well carve “Chewbacca” on his tombstone already. Scott Palmer doesn’t run from it. T&E is likely to remain the apex of his existence on earth. Rather than run from it, he’s chosen to own it. Respectable. Plus, he’ll sit on you.