Subversion comes in many forms, and one of the most effective is dark humor. Charles Yu’s story “Good News Bad News,” a collection of headlines from the future, demonstrates how insurmountable our problems feel when presented in the chill language of journalese. As Yu rolls through the headlines, we learn that refugee families are settling on the moon; climate change is still being debated a millennium from now; scientists have confirmed that we’re living in a simulation; “delegates from Kingdom Plantae, the world’s first nation-state of sentient trees,” are going to the United Nations; and the 10-day forecast is:

“Hot. “Hot.

“Hot.

“Hot.

“Hot.“Really hot.

“Dangerously hot.

“What are we going to do about this hot.

“Slightly less hot but still extremely troublingly hot.

“Hot.”

Yu’s future is as depressing as it is hot. The human race is still running on the hamster wheel toward doom. Except for the sentient trees, “Good News Bad News” seems like mostly bad news to me.

Unbearable heat is also the central motif of Catherynne M. Valente’s story “The Sun in Exile,” a parable that illustrates the absurdity of climate change denial. The story opens in a scorched world, where everything is cooking down to its essence: “Tomatoes simmered on the vine … and an entire city evaporated into steam like so much water in a copper-bottomed pot.” Yet even as people fry, a leader named Papa Ubu denies that it is hot at all. He wears winter gear and gives speeches about the terrible cold, while his daughter, who is “as beautiful and unmoving as carved ice,” travels through the country handing out blankets to sweaty people who “shone like their skin was made of diamonds.” Soon the word “hot” is banned so as to “not torment the suffering.” Like “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” Valente’s story is a study in how the powerful, through manipulation and the suppression of speech, create an alternate reality for the masses, one that contradicts both fact and lived experience. Such dystopian fairy tales reduce complexity to its lowest point, and can be frustrating to read, but Valente successfully lays bare the dangers of a leader who creates his own reality. One leaves “A People’s Future of the United States” understanding that imaginary worlds can create a heaven or a hell, depending on your ideology. As N. K. Jemisin, whose work appears in this collection, is quoted in the publicity materials: “Imagination is where revolution begins. ”

While there is nothing particularly revolutionary about THE DEVIL ASPECT (Doubleday, $27.95), the beguiling and gruesome new horror thriller by the British novelist Craig Russell, it is a wildly entertaining story that grabs you on Page 1 and drags you into its dark world kicking and screaming. That’s a good thing, as far as I’m concerned. Russell has created a truly frightening story, one that gets under your skin slowly, then goes deep, like the tip of a butcher knife. I read the novel one snowy night by the fire, unable to sleep until I finished, then unable to sleep once I had.

Czechoslovakia, 1935: We follow Dr. Viktor Kosarek, a dashing, brilliant psychiatrist, as he takes his new position at the Hrad Orlu Asylum, a gloomy castle in the town of Mlada Boleslav. Kosarek, a former student of Carl Jung, has developed an experimental treatment he plans to try on the six criminally insane patients confined at Hrad Orlu, all notorious killers known as the Devil’s Six. As Kosarek takes these killers back through their crimes via drug-induced hypnosis, a detective in Prague leads an investigation into a Jack the Ripper copycat killer. The hunt for the murderer merges with Dr. Kosarek’s experiments on the Devil’s Six, creating a suspenseful psychological mystery. Mladek, a clown whose alter ego Harlequin killed children, says at one point: “The truth is the Devil comes into our lives, at least once, at one time or another. Everyone encounters him, but most don’t know he’s there.”

While Harlequin would have you meet the Devil in person, every witch worth her grimoire knows that evil is best carried out by a spirit companion, or familiar. Stacey Halls’s debut novel, THE FAMILIARS (Mira, $26.99), explores the power a group of witches wields over a small 17th-century English community. It is 1612 in the county of Lancashire, and the young and spunky Fleetwood Shuttleworth, wife of a rich country gentleman, desperately wants a child after three stillbirths. Pregnant and fearful, Fleetwood hires a midwife, Alice Gray, with connections to a group of women accused of witchcraft. For those acquainted with the history of English witch trials, and the famous conviction of the Pendle witches in Lancashire in 1612, Halls’s novel offers a rich and atmospheric reimagining of a historical period rife with religious tensions, superstitions, misogyny and fear.

We experience the story through 17-year-old Fleetwood’s perspective, with all her insecurities and ambitions. There are moments when Fleetwood’s many conflicts — with her mother, her servants, her less than lusty husband — feel a tad, well, familiar. That said, through Fleetwood’s dilemma we are privy to the atmosphere of paranoia and fear that accompanies a veritable mass hysteria. Now, with so many high-profile men claiming to be victims of a witch hunt, it’s good to understand what a real one looks like. In Pendle, 12 people were accused of witchcraft; 11 were tried. Nine were found guilty, one died awaiting trial and one went free. Not great odds, fellas.