FLICKER
By Theodore Roszak
No Exit, £8.99

Despite strong suspicions that no conspiracy novel will ever better Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum I seldom resist throwing myself beneath the wheels of possible contenders, a predilection not uncommon given the rampaging success of The Da Vinci Code (material for a conspiracy theory in its own right). In overview Flicker, originally published in 1991, appears a succulent dish for the paranoid fiction gourmand. Entranced by rare samples of the work of Max Castle, a German Expressionist director whose work devolved into oddly mesmerising B-movie bilge in 1930s Hollywood, Jonathan Gates, a film student and later UCLA lecturer, begins a 20-year study of the director that sets him on a trail involving mass hypnosis, film noir, Vatican spies, splattercore, Orson Welles, the Albigensian Crusade, the Knights Templar, tantric sex and more. But while this huge novel is a worthwhile read for the leisured paranoiac, the creeping unease engendered by vivid descriptions of Castle’s movies and the forward momentum vital to the genre fail to keep pace with its exponentially dilating conspiratorial purview.

OLD SCHOOL
By Tobias Wolff
Bloomsbury, £7.99

At an elite New England boy’s school in the 1960s Wolff’s narrator, a scholarship boy plagued by an outsider’s unease, struggles with a story that might win him an hour’s private conversation with Ernest Hemingway, his literary hero. The ironic way in which his entry takes shape is one of numerous masterfully realised thematic counterpoints with which Wolff’s novel, at once a meditation on writing and on the life well, if messily lived, abounds.

STEVENSON UNDER THE PALM TREES
By Alberto Manguel
Canongate, £6.99

I suspect that Robert Louis Stevenson would have approved of Manguel’s darkly intricate imagining of the Scot’s last days on Samoa. While struggling with Weir of Hermiston Stevenson encounters his double, a dour missionary by the name of Baker. Subsequent meetings and low deeds spawn enthralling ambiguities about Stevenson’s attitudes and his spats with the Samoan authorities. The briefness of this novella belies its fecundity.

DEMONIZED
By Christopher Fowler
Serpent’s Tail, £7.99

Dealing with the Situation, a story from Fowler’s grisly collection, skilfully evokes a manic domestic scene in which a mother juggles phone calls while her three young daughters cause havoc and a water leak worsens, only for a hamfisted conclusion to spoil it all. The majority of the other 16 stories suffer the same fault without the expiatory benefit of the good bit. Fowler’s pessimistic vision more often than not communicates itself as schoolboy portentousness.

DON’T TELL ME THE TRUTH ABOUT LOVE
By Dan Rhodes
Canongate, £7.99

These seven love stories, first published in 2001, all display in their tempering of cuteness with calamity Rhodes’s love of slipping a razor blade into a ball of candyfloss. Love, in the worlds presented here, tends to end in abject despair — movingly so in the excellent Landslide and Mademoiselle Arc-en-ciel — or even death. For all the picturebook simplicity of Rhodes’s storytelling his characters are rarely less than credibly human, and the emotion genuine.

Non-fiction: Iain Finlayson

THE LONGSHOREMAN
By Richard Shelton
Atlantic, £8.99

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