My quest for weird has turned up some gems, and shown me that we need to nurture new writing talent in both mainstream and independent publishing.

A month ago I threw open the doors of the Weird Things column to all comers. Nominate your weird stories I said, and nominate them you did. I've looked at more than 500 independently published weird stories, from writers of whom I had in all but a few cases never heard. I hope it has been a genuine exercise in new talent spotting, and I hope the five stories (and a few honourable mentions) highlighted below will all receive some well-deserved attention as a consequence. I've also returned from my quest for weird with a better understanding of the new paradigm of digital independent publishing, one formed as much by what I did not find as what I did.

What I did not find were a lot of good books lingering in obscurity outside the publishing mainstream. The truth is that good books are few and far between. And great books are as rare as unobtanium. They are, consequently, really rather valuable and therefore hardly likely to be found on the Amazon Kindle 99p bestseller lists.

This is quite in opposition to the rhetoric of absurd clown figures like JA Konrath, who argue that every other self-published writer is a potential Stephen King if only the eeeevil publishers weren't keeping them down. But it also goes against the business model of the major publishers, which is founded on the exploitation of novels as a commodity. If good books are actually rare and unpredictable, where does that leave the business model of publishers who want to sell them like tins of beans in Tesco?

What I did find were books and writers with the potential to be great. One or two of them need only a little bit of polish and a snazzy cover design. Interestingly, the books that edged towards greatness were not the ones hard-selling themselves in to the Kindle top 100, or the ones trying hard to be tins of beans. They were the ones that, however rough around the edges they might be, sounded like the author just really wanted to write them.

More than anything else that is what shone out of my weird story selections below. I hope you like them as much as I do, or even more!

Dice & Dysfunctionality by Fay Knight is a novel about Role-Playing Games, and the suburban geek culture that surrounds them. RPG's are the true heartland of geekdom. You aren't really a citizen of that nation until you have spent a few hundred evenings rolling dice to determine THAC0 and eating fast food while an Alpha geek Dungeon Master imposes his / her will on you. It's a culture so central to the geek identity that it is positively begging for a smart writer to come along and dissect it. Fay Knight may be that writer. Dice & Dysfunctionality is stylistically workmanlike at best, and littered with grammatical errors, but Knight captures the claustrophobic atmosphere of a room full of people acting out in metaphor the choices they don't have the courage to make in reality. Imagine Jean-Paul Sartre's In Camera rewritten by Josh Whedon with the cast of Clerks and you'll be getting somewhere close.

City of Roses by Kip Manley is the closest I came a really well-crafted, character-driven fantasy. Volume 1 is entitled "Wake Up…" and collects together the first 11 parts of the episodic drama, which the author recommends you think of as a DVD box set of your favourite television show. City of Roses is an urban fantasy set in Portland, Oregon, and its mix of young, bohemian characters and mythic fantasy tropes reminded me strongly of Charles de Lint. Manley's prose style is a couple of cuts above the increasingly tedious first-person narrations of urban fantasy heroines like Sookie Stackhouse. While I only had time to tackle the first few episodes, City of Roses is an absorbing read that many fantasy fans will enjoy immensely.

The No Hellos Diet by Sam Pink backs in to weirdness in much the same way as the early novels of Chuck Palahnuik. Life lived on the sketchy edges of society has an innate weirdness brought on by poverty, social exclusion and mental illness. Pink is a keen observer of the culture of minimum-wage jobs and low-rent studio apartments that is the reality of life for all those who don't find a cog space in today's hyper-capitalist economy. The No Hellos Diet is the story of a shop clerk with no dreams or aspirations, told in the second person because, frankly, this is your life we're talking about here. Eraserhead Press, publisher of Sam Pink through the Lazy Fascist imprint, deserves every success for championing an author who it is unlikely would ever see the light day through any major publisher.

Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings by Kuzhali Manickavel is just very, very beautiful. The stories it collects are by turns weird, whimsical, surreal, visceral, haunting, quirky and fantastic. Manickavel's writing is poetic, her stories often little more than captured moments that hint at larger happenings beyond their borders, vignettes rich in the details of character and emotion. In short, the kind of thing you will either love very much or find deeply frustrating. Kuzhali Manickavel is an Indian writer who lived in Canada until she was 13. At their best, such as in "You Have Us All Late" and "Follow", her stories combine the magical realist tendencies with the detailed life of contemporary India as seen from the inside.

Bedtime Stories for Children You Hate by Antoinette Bergin is my personal favourite of all the books I have considered for this quest, and frankly one of my favourite books full stop. Bergin, if we are to believe her authorial persona, has spent a long and painful career as a nanny for numerous well-to-do families. An unfortunate career choice, given her clear dislike of children. The book contains a selection of stories told by Bergin to her hateful wards. They range from the horrifying ("Your Upstairs Neighbour Kills People") to the gross ("Will Fluffy Live Forever") to the deeply unhappy ("I Thought We Were Camping"), and if Ms Bergin's aim is to rob young children of their ill-deserved innocence then these stories succeed admirably. The more obviously grotesque stories are balanced with stark observations of callous and desperate human behaviour that suggest Ms Bergin, with or without her authorial persona, is a writer to be reckoned with. If my quest persuades you to part with 77 pence for only one Kindle book, I suggest you make it this one.

In place of a sixth title I've decided instead to include a list of honourable mentions, for a number of weird stories that captured either my heart, mind or soul, but for one reason or other did not win over all three at once. Prime Intellect by Roger Williams is a true hard SF epic with tones of Charles Stross and Hannu Rajenemi, but its ideas weren't quite original enough to win me over. The Oneiropolis Compendium wins the award for best use of felt-tip pen, and the bestiary entries are great fun, but the lack of any real narrative limited its interest for me. The Defective Detective series by Adam Maxwell has cool covers and funky scooby-doo pacing, as one would expect from one of the web's best self-published writers. The Boviniad is – wait for it – a translation in epic verse of an imagined future Iliad set in a giant space cow. This was actually TOO weird, which deserves an award in and of itself for writer Nathan Jerpe. And finally, like many in the book industry I am cynical about book trailers, but if Teddy and the Darkgate's horrifying combination of an innocent stuffed bear and menacing music doesn't make you want to see if the teddy gets it, nothing will.