In Lois Murphy’s atmospheric debut, Soon (Titan, £7.99), something very strange is happening in the remote Western Australia township of Nebulah. It was once a thriving mining town, but now its population has been reduced to 500. One day a convoy of grey vehicles arrives, only to mysteriously vanish. They are followed by a creeping mist haunted by the ghosts of the town’s dead; citizens who venture outside in darkness are taken by the mist, never to be seen again. Soon the population of Nebulah stands at a mere six benighted souls, the derelict and downtrodden, who have their own reasons to remain. Narrated by Pete McIntosh, a flawed but likable washed-up ex-cop, this story of low-key horror and creeping paranoia follows the fate of the last half dozen to its devastating climax. Winner of the prestigious Australian Aurealis award for the best horror novel of 2017, Soon is a penetrating psychological study of desperate characters existing on the edge of society, and their struggle to retain a semblance of humanity in the face of an unknown terror.

In Kassandra Montag’s first novel, After the Flood (Borough, £12.99), it’s the year 2130 and global heating has taken its inevitable toll. Rising sea levels have inundated the continents and what was once the US is now a string of small islands. Some survivors eke out a subsistence living on land, while others have taken to the seas, where life is even more precarious. Myra and her daughter Pearl are among the latter, trading the fish they catch while attempting to avoid pirates, who treat women like cattle. Seven years earlier, Myra’s husband abducted her younger daughter Rowena, and Myra’s life since then has been a constant, heartbreaking search for the girl. When Myra hears a rumour that Rowena might be living in remote Greenland, she persuades a ship’s captain to take her on the long voyage north. Montag balances graphically rendered set-piece adventures with a moving account of a mother’s love as Myra, resilient yet vulnerable, faces triumphs and setbacks on her perilous quest to reclaim her daughter. By turns bleak and uplifting, this is a refreshingly original take on the dystopian post-apocalyptic subgenre.

Alex Stern, protagonist of Ninth House (Gollancz, £16.99), Leigh Bardugo’s first novel for adults, is not your average Yale student. The wayward daughter of LA hippies, Alex is a vulnerable high-school drop-out with a history of drug abuse. She also possesses unique supernatural abilities, which is why she was offered a place at the university. Alex becomes one of the guardians of Lethe House, a secret society monitoring the dark goings-on in the eight other Houses, which are run by a privileged elite inclined to occult excess. When a student is murdered, she uncovers a web of terror and abuse. Ninth House is a timely exploration of the use and abuse of power and a gut-churning thriller that pulls no punches, with a strong female lead and a headlong plot.

In the first book of the Salvation series, Peter F Hamilton introduced a large cast scattered across a sprawling galaxy-wide utopia threatened by an enigmatic alien race. In Salvation Lost (Macmillan, £20), he ratchets up the tension and splits the narrative between the 23rd century and the far future. We follow many characters from volume one, as well as a host of new faces, as the human race joins forces with benevolent extraterrestrials, the Neána, and works to save itself from the malign Olyix, who are intent on harvesting Homo sapiens as offerings to their god. Hamilton excels at interweaving the narratives of multiple viewpoint characters without once relaxing narrative impetus, combining time-lines to great dramatic effect and telling a tense hi-tech story that never loses sight of the human element. Best read after the opening volume, Salvation Lost is action-oriented hardcore science fiction at its page-turning best.

Loosely based on the killings of a mother and daughter accused of witchcraft, Clay McLeod Chapman’s The Remaking (Quirk, £9.99) retells and recasts the real events in a series of connected episodes. When Ella Louise Ford and her daughter Jessica were burned as witches in Pilot’s Creek, Virginia, in 1931, the murders and the stories of the subsequent ghostly hauntings echoed down the years. In 1971 the story is made into a low-budget horror film starring nine-year-old Amber Pendleton in the part of Jessica, a role that will haunt her for the rest of her life. In 1995 the original film is remade, with a washed-up, drug-addicted Amber this time playing the part of Jessica’s mother. The story jumps to 2016, when the director of a podcast travels to Pilot’s Creek to track down Amber and investigate the events of 1931. Chapman uses an array of narrative techniques in an ambitious mosaic novel exploring the power of urban myth and superstition.

• Eric Brown’s latest novel is Murder Served Cold (Severn House).