Annihilation (Jeff VanderMeer)

A dense, even claustrophobic, evocation of the strangeness that has taken over a section of the southeastern US called Area X. Some unexplained event (ecological? alien?) killed or pushed out all the people, and within the barrier there is untamed wildness and disturbing things that claw at the soul and twist the senses. The first-person narrator (nobody in the whole book has a name) is a member of an expedition sent within the barrier to explore and try to document what is going on in there, but the team quickly falls into paranoia and is overwhelmed by things that can't even be described, much less explained. The writing is gorgeous, drawing you into the deepening horror the main character experiences. This is the first of a series of novels set in this universe, and it never really reaches a resolution, which actually fits with the off-kilter, unnatural feeling of the whole book. I can't say I really liked it, because horror isn't my cup of tea and it reminds me of the kind of Lovecraftian story where loathsome creatures lurk around every corner, but I have to admire how well the author achieved his goal.

The Fuller Memorandum (Charles Stross)

I'm reading the Laundry Files series out of order, which is a little confusing, but I love them anyway. The mixture of humor, pop culture, computers, science geekery, Lovecraftian horror, James Bond, and soul-deadening bureaucracy really works for me. In this one, we learn a little about Angleton, Bob Howard's very scary boss, and find out why he's even scarier than we thought. Along the way Bob's wife Mo proves her badassery with the demon-killing violin and Bob has to face an army of cultists bent on sacrificing him to the ultimate dark lord, armed with nothing but his knowledge of computational demonology. Great stuff.

The Apocalypse Codex (Charles Stross)

Another in the Laundry Files series, which I love for its humor, its intelligence, and its willingness to twist genre boundaries into Moebius strips. Bob Howard is again the narrator, telling how he is threatened with promotion within the more-secret-than-secret British agency charged with protecting England and the world from Lovecraftian horrors that constantly try to breach the boundaries between the worlds and munch on our tasty human souls. In this version, the charismatic leader of a splinter faction of an evangelistic American church is demonstrating a distressingly effective ability to rally the faithful. It turns out that the Second Coming is not quite what they think it is, and Howard and a beautiful, powerful witch named Persephone have to shut them down. If you like humor and horror woven together, you'll love this one.

The Jennifer Morgue (Charles Stross)

Another Laundry Files novel from Charles Stross. These stories are always a mind-twisting blend of horror (many-tentacled creatures from the murky deeps), police procedure (griping about pencil-neck desk-jockeys who don't know what it's really like out here in the field), and geekery (what else from someone who writes sidekicks named Pinky and Brains?). Bob Howard works for a top-secret British intelligence agency but he's no James Bond. As a computational demonologist, his specialty is understanding how mathematical formulae and computer programs breach the walls between worlds and let those horrors through, forcing the good guys to stop them and clean up the mess according to the proper bureaucratic rules, in triplicate. In this story, Howard starts out attending an international meeting of similar organizations, expecting a boring weekend of conference rooms and PowerPoint, but winds up soul-linked with a demon assassin and dragged to a Caribbean island to stop a megalomaniacal billionaire from stealing a deep-sea artifact that can destroy the world. Of course.  Stross scatters every page with gems that are as smart as they are funny. I have to love an author whose narrator describes the experience of driving a rented Smart Car on the German autobahn "while a jerk is shooting at me from behind with a cannon loaded with Porches and Mercedes."

The Girl With All the Gifts (M. R. Carey)

If I'm not careful, I'll develop a theme of reading zombie stories where the protagonist is a good zombie, bent on protecting the humans from the bad zombies. That was the theme in Raising Stony Mayhall (Daryl Gregory), and it's the theme here. It has all the usual zombie tropes (relentless, mindless creatures hunting human flesh, humans huddling in enclaves, fleeing across a world of decay and ruin) even though it never actually uses the word zombie. The main character is a child who, despite being infected with the zombie parasite, still has a mind and a strong sense of morality. How can she live with the humans who increasingly learn to care about her? How can she learn to live with herself? Is there any future for humanity, and what could that look like? This book doesn't have the depth of Stony, but it was engaging, thrilling, and moving. I completely enjoyed it.

Maplecroft (Cherie Priest)

I'm not a big fan of horror, nor of historical fiction, so this book wasn't really up my alley. Given all that, I quite liked it. Lizzy Borden, she of the axe, had reasons for what she did, reasons based in an ancient evil that calls to people, turning them into inhuman creatures of death. The Victorian style, based on what are supposedly written notes and letters, is inherently slow, but the action still built to a satisfactory conclusion. I liked that the central figures are strong, intelligent women, and that science and rationality are important to survival. If horror is your cup of tea, you'll enjoy this one.