I came to this doubtful that I'd ever read John Lanchester before, but found myself at times doubting the sanity of that. We start with a perfect modern ghost story – huge house, alienation effect at full throttle for the characters, parental concerns… Next, a conceited-and-then-some professor type gets stuck in a conference he would rather not be attending, as it's so far beneath him – but finds his choice of distraction to be a problem. It would make a relishable audiobook download, I'm sure. Less successfully we have a shorter piece, where Kafkaesque bureaucracy of the modern, almost fast-food style, tries to disguise a very obvious twist, if you can even call it that. Again not so much to my taste is the legend of four academics in a coffee bar who thought-experiment the thicker half of the world away, only to find it might not have been half.

"Hell is other people", as we all well know, and that's partly portrayed by the title story, a look at a Love Island/Big Brother villa where the programme makers might not actually be playing by the rules of their artifice. I'm guessing I liked the story, but it did seem to take some time to get to its crux. 'Cold Call' certainly has an equally witty title, in its look at a female lawyer over-burdened by her lot – and her father-in-law. 'The Kit' is nothing to do with baby mammals, or football clothes, but a peculiar look at, well, built-in redundancy, possibly. Weird Biblical names try their best to hide the fact this is all about the final kick, the twist, the punchline – which, not for the only time in these pages, is a little too long in the coming. But when we close with a story that tries to suggest the ghosts left within donations to a charity shop, yet more pertinently shows <spoiler>what happens when you merge the old adage of a photograph being a way to steal your soul with the selfie generation </spoiler>, you can see there is very much a nice spread to this book, that at times verges on the genre piece, and others hits it square on. To me the hit and miss ratio was kind of skewed because the problems with the misses were surmountable, and the hits were definitely hits, along the line of smashing a dart into one already in the bullseye. All told, this appealing selection probably does deserve four stars.

Wow this was an absolute delight. A collection of modern ghostly tales to chill the blood. I especially loved the haunted audiobook one and the ghost of a man who was so distracted by his phone he died... the one with the big brother staged as hell was impressive I absolutely loved it. I cannot wait for this glorious collection to be published.