Selfie-sticks with demonic powers.

Cold calls from the dead.

And that creeping suspicion, as you sit there with your flat white, that none of this is real.

John Lanchester's first book of shorter fictions, Reality, and Other Stories is a gathering of deliciously chilling entertainments, to be read as the evenings draw in and the days are haunted by all the ghastly schlock, uncanny technologies and absurd horrors of modern life.