In Shattered Minds (Macmillan, £12.99) Laura Lam combines William Gibson’s noirish cyberpunk vibe with Kim Stanley Robinson’s social concern and world-building to produce a gripping, fast-paced hi-tech thriller peopled by flawed but believable characters. In a near-future US west coast state known as Pacifica, ex-neuroscientist Carina was the subject of an experiment carried out by Sudice Inc. It left her with violent urges and an addiction to a drug called zeal. With her memory of the experiment wiped, she begins to hallucinate a dead girl, a fellow victim of Sudice’s sinister mind-mapping operation. Together with a team of hackers, she works to bring down the organisation, restrain the homicidal urges in her own shattered mind and come to some understanding of her fraught past. The novel works as a tense techno-thriller, as state-of-the-art extrapolative SF, and as a moving exploration of character in which even the bad guys are portrayed with sympathy.

In previous books, Christina Henry has taken the story of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, turned it on its head, and added a twist of violence and grim psychological insight. Now she does the job on JM Barrie’s Peter Pan in Lost Boy (Titan, £7.99). Jamie and Peter enjoy an idyllic existence on the Island, along with a host of other boys who play with mermaids, hunt and fish and do battle with evil pirates. Occasionally a boy dies, causing Jamie much pain, but not the unfeeling Peter, who blithely flies to the Other Place to replenish his stock of young, lonely and vulnerable playmates. When Jamie forms an abiding friendship with one such boy, five-year-old Charlie, he provokes Peter’s jealousy. This is the catalyst for a series of terrible events that lead to Jamie’s transformation into Captain James Hook and to Peter Pan becoming a vengeful psychopath. Henry gleefully slaughters a host of sacred cows in a tale of soured friendship, betrayal and revenge. You’ll never look at Peter Pan in the same way again.

Daryl Gregory’s Spoonbenders (Riverrun, £14.99) takes a madcap look at the US in the latter half of the 20th century through the dysfunctional but endearing Telemachus family. Years before the novel begins, conman father Teddy, his psychic wife Maureen and their three children – who all posses supernormal powers – come a cropper while performing their act on national TV and the family is discredited. In 1995, mourning the loss of their mother, Irene, Frankie and Buddy live washed-up lives that are blighted rather than enhanced by their peculiar talents. Irene’s ability to detect lies has ruined her life; Frankie’s telekinesis has not stopped him becoming indebted to the mob; and Buddy’s “memory” of the future has robbed him of free will. Things are about to change, though, when Irene’s son, Matty, discovers an ability to have out-of-body experiences. What follows is a hilarious, freewheeling caper involving Chicago gangsters and government secret agents, culminating in a satisfyingly bittersweet denouement.

Veteran novelist Kit Reed does a good line in dysfunctional families, prickly individuals and the kind of psychic claustrophobia that ensues when a group of disparate characters – plus an unsettled ghost – find themselves domiciled in a gothic house in Jacksonville, Florida. In Mormama (Tor, £20.40), Dell wakes up in hospital with no memory of who he is or how he came to be homeless – his only clue is an address scrawled on the back of an index card. When he makes his way to 553 May Street, he finds a decrepit Victorian house inhabited by a woman called Lane, her teenage son Theo, three wonderfully mean-spirited old aunts and a ghost. Told in a series of short chapters from the multiple viewpoints of family members past and present, Mormama recounts the history of Ellis House and the serial horrors that have befallen the family. It drip-feeds horror leavened with flashes of wince-inducing humour.

In a market replete with Buffy clones and romantic portrayals of angst-ridden teen vampires, do we really need another urban bloodsucker novel? Well, perhaps not – unless that novel is The Truants by Lee Markham (Duckworth Overlook, £12.99). It starts with an interestingly bleak premise, and gets ever darker. Distraught at the suicide of his partner, an “old-one” sits down to die in the light of the rising sun, but is stabbed by a young thug before he expires. As the blade is used again and again, and the old-one’s consciousness moves from victim to victim, Markham examines the grim existences of Britain’s have-nots: drug-addicts and the dispossessed, the poverty-stricken inhabitants of sink estates and the victims of mindless violence. A relentlessly brutal, nihilistic read, told in stripped-down, staccato prose, The Truants uses the metaphor of the vampire to portray society’s true victims and shines a despairingly honest light on areas not usually illuminated by genre fiction.

• Eric Brown’s latest novel is Binary System (Solaris).