The Silent Land, by Graham Joyce (Gollancz, £9.99)

On the second day of their skiing holiday in the French Pyrenees, Jake and Zoe Bennett narrowly escape death in an avalanche. They return to their hotel only to find the village deserted, and when they try to leave, fearing further avalanches, they are returned to their point of departure. This is the start of a series of inexplicable events: time seems to be in stasis; candles burn extra slowly and meat and vegetables fail to rot; then, shadowy figures appear, observing their plight. Joyce is skilled at delineating the fracture lines of relationships, and sets up the Bennetts' claustrophobic confinement in minute detail, showing how their love for each other withstands and overcomes the growing mystery of their circumstances  a love made all the more tragic in light of the novel's moving dénouement.

Catastrophia, edited by Allen Ashley (PS Publishing, £20)

One of the pleasures of this anthology is the range of catastrophes on offer. There are post-apocalyptic visions aplenty: stories of alien invasion, vegetal take-over, self-inflicted annihilation, plagues, viruses and much more, ranging from the over-the-top black humour of Jet McDonald's "Scalped", which begins with global hair-loss and ends in deliquescing brains, to the more sober, literary examination of the breakdown of society when humanity suffers apperceptive prosopagnosia  face-blindness  in Ian Sales's affecting "In the Face of Disaster". Other highlights are "Trouble with Telebrations" by Tim Nickels, a Wyndhamesque pastiche in which the BBC is complicit in bringing about the end of the world; and Nina Allan's "The Phoney War", a poignant examination of personal relationships in the face of imminent alien invasion. Superb.

The End of the Line, edited by Jonathan Oliver (Solaris, £7.99)

The 19 contemporary horror stories collected here are set in a variety of underground transit systems, many featuring the fertile locale of the London Underground, and others exploring the Paris Métro, the New York Subway, Liverpool's underground, and even an alien network far beneath the Arctic ice-cap. The collection is well balanced between gross-out horror  Stephen Volk's angry "In The Colosseum", a brilliant examination of moral corruption, and Simon Bestwick's "The Sons of the City", where troglodytes work to undermine Manchester  and tales of subtle unease, as in Nicholas Royle's "The Lure", about a young man's affair with an older woman in Paris, and "Bullroarer" by Paul Meloy, in which a repressed homosexual looks back on the act of schoolboy treachery which ruined his life. Recommended.

The Nemesis List, by RJ Frith (Tor, £16.99)

Publisher's hype and packaging  a spaceship graces the cover  leads the reader to expect a shoot-'em-up space chase, but the novel is a far more successful examination of characters under stress. A boy, Jake, is taken and imprisoned by scientists aboard a gene-ship, and experimented upon along with other youngsters. He's pumped full of drugs in order to expand his memory, his brain then filled with a surfeit of information in order to test its tolerances. When a government raid frees Jake, he goes on a killing spree to assassinate those responsible for the experiments. The body of the novel is set years later, when a politician hires Frank Pak and his crew to kidnap Jake for the limitless information he contains. What follows is a routine chase  not helped by Frith's less than euphonious prose  and some fine insights into Jake's fractured personality. Despite its flaws, The Nemesis List marks a promising debut.

Eric Brown's Engineman is published by Solaris.