M John Harrison's prose has thrilled this reviewer since adolescence, and also Angela Carter, Deborah Levy, and Robert Macfarlane - though apparently not enough to overcome genre snobbery about the science fiction and fantasy sandboxes where he's been playing for decades. His 1989 novel Climbers, a rigorously realistic affair, looked like it might finally get him some mainstream respect, but Harrison being Harrison, he's since kept things genre-fluid and uncompromisingly peculiar.
Back in the 1970s and '80s, he wrote about Viriconium, a fabled city crumbling into decadence and anarchy - a swashbuckling yet sinister escape hatch for readers who preferred a far-flung nightmare to the daily grind. But here in the 21st century, reality has gotten so fantastical that Harrison no longer needs to invent fictional dystopias; his anarchic, disintegrated metropolis is now London, and his new novel The End of Everything is set in an unnamed town on the Kent coast. The book offers a bleak but brilliant tale of enigmatic alien entities and slow social collapse, exposing the terrifying insecurity of life right now - because apparently, even our fictional apocalypses have been downgraded to local news.