Vicious this one

VE Schwab's first adult novel, Vicious (Titan Books, £7.99), opens with two people in a graveyard, one an escaped convict, the other a dead 12-year-old girl, digging up a corpse that might not be a corpse. We then reverse 10 years and follow college students Eli and Victor as they conduct their research projects: one on ExtraOrdinaries (people with superpowers), the other on adrenaline. They conduct experiments on themselves, with disastrous consequences: they have turned themselves into ExtraOrdinaries and become mortal enemies along the way. The novel, with an expert use of flashback to elucidate character and motivation, charts Eli's quest to rid the world of ExtraOrdinaries by murdering them, and Victor's attempts to thwart him. But who is the hero, and who the villain? Vicious has been garnering much pre-publication praise, and rightly so: it's a brilliant exploration of the superhero mythos and a riveting revenge thriller.

Hive Monkey

Ack-Ack Macaque is back to save the world in Gareth L Powell's fourth novel, Hive Monkey (Solaris, £7.99). Ack-Ack is a surly, cynical, hard-drinking, bellicose monkey uplifted to sentience with the aid of a gelware brain implant. He is now the pilot of a vast airship and, with the aid of streetwise Glaswegian computer hacker K8, washed-up SF writer William Cole and airship owner Victoria Valois, is attempting to save the planet from a hive-mind horde bent on invading from another dimension. Ack-Ack is an inspired creation, a monkey with attitude, issues and a hole where his heart should be, and his latest deftly plotted adventure is riotous fun.

Strange mammals

Jason Erik Lundberg's third collection, Strange Mammals (Infinity Plus, £7.99), gathers 25 short stories in which literary naturalism gives way to the surreal, the absurd and the magical. A widow grieving her husband yet unable to cry finds release when her gay friend grows wings and flies away; a teacher in a college whose resources are limited finds much-needed blackboard chalk in the chest cavity of a dead professor. Standout stories include "Enlightenment" – about easy-going Ray, who is selected as the next Dalai Lama, and the life-affirming choice he makes regarding his future – and the poignant "King of Hearts", about an Alzheimer's sufferer's constant return to the venue of his ex‑wife's infidelity. Lundberg has the enviable talent of achieving emotionally resonant effects within just a few pages.

Plastic jesus

Part cyberpunk futuristic thriller, part post-apocalyptic nightmare, Wayne Simmons's Plastic Jesus (Salt, £8.99) is a grim satire on contemporary western hedonism and the religious impulse. After a holy war has torn the world apart, Lark City finds itself separated from a totalitarian America by 200 miles of ocean. The city is a cauldron of corruption, violence and vice, and Johnny Lyon is tasked by his employees, Alt Corp, to create a virtual-reality Jesus in order to give the people what they want. Of course, things begin to go wrong when the programme takes on a life of its own, and Simmons convincingly depicts an already hellish society's irrevocable slide into chaos. The author's previous novels have been in the horror genre, and this shows in his ability to pile on the terror and ratchet up the tension: Plastic Jesus is a stunning read, but not for the faint‑hearted.

Time Travellers

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's The Time Traveller's Almanac (Head of Zeus, £25) comprises 69 stories, 948 pages, and half a million words. It's a monster, and could kill off all other proposed anthologies on the theme for years to come. It's also a roll call of the great and good in the science fiction genre, from HG Wells's "The Time Machine" to Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" and up to the present with "The Mouse Ran Down" by Adrian Tchaikovsky, including contributions from names not usually associated with the SF genre, such as Max Beerbohm and EF Benson. It will go down in posterity as comprehensive and indispensable.

Eidolon this one

Libby McGugan's first novel, The Eidolon (Solaris, £7.99), is ambitious on a number of counts: it's a first person, present-tense narrative throughout – not always an easy trick to pull off – and fuses hard science with fantasy, an amalgam that could easily come unstuck. Physicist Robert Strong is a scientist who, sacked from his job researching dark matter, is offered a lot of money to be insinuated into Cern and sabotage the Large Hadron Collider, whose operation certain parties are convinced will bring about the end of the world. He's also hallucinating dead people – and things get stranger when creatures of myth begin to manifest themselves. Not only does McGugan successfully navigate between the occult and the scientific, but she tells a taut, tense, fast-paced thriller with a neat denouement.

• Eric Brown's latest novel is The Serene Invasion (Solaris).