Malcolm Devlin, a British fiction writer currently living in Australia, published You Will Grow Into Them, his debut short story collection in 2017 to a glowing reception. He’s since published a second volume (Unexpected Places To Fall From, Unexpected Places To Land) and a zombie-themed novel (And Then I Woke Up); now the Influx imprint is now putting You Will Grow Into Them back in circulation, a boon for ‘weird fiction’ / crypto-horror dabblers like this reviewer who was out of the loop the first time around.

These 10 stories are a stylistically varied bunch, reasonably enough for a debutant. The shortest, ‘The Bridge’, is perhaps the most affecting, for its absence of paranormal content: a couple move into a house and discover a meticulous scale model of the local area, built by the previous occupant as an apparent post-bereavement coping mechanism. The longest, ‘Songs Like They Used To Play’, uses a timeslip device while offering implicit commentary on the ethics of reality TV, but over nearly 60 pages it never quite feels focused.

Devlin’s stories’ conceits are not necessarily fabulously original in themselves, but more often than not he’s able to build a world around them, with a keen eye for supplementary detail, that gets us airborne. ‘Two Brothers’ is set in a cold, paternalistic upper-class British family, circa the early 20th century: the relationship between the school-age brothers in question, complicated by lines of succession, is germane to the ghastly discovery on which the story hinges. ‘Dogsbody’ is about werewolves – hardly groundbreaking – but shrewdly uses this as a basis to examine British class politics and anti-migrant rhetoric.