When I finished Nick Kolakowski’s riveting thriller Boise Longpig Hunting Club, I was eager for a sequel. Over the course of that novel, the central characters–bounty hunter Jake Halligan, his gun-running sister, Frankie, and Jake’s fiancée, Janine–became prey in a “Most Dangerous Game”-style hunt orchestrated by a corrupt and powerful billionaire, Ted Baker, who’d blamed the death of his coke-dealing brother on Jake and Frankie’s late father, a former deputy. Though the trio ended up slaughtering their way to freedom, one thing seemed clear by the novel’s conclusion: When you kill a man like Baker, along with his rich and influential fellow hunters, there are bound to be consequences.

Fortunately for readers like me, Kolakowski just released Rattlesnake Rodeo, a gripping sequel that unleashes these consequences with force, pushing Jake and Frankie into uncomfortable new territory, physically and morally.

This wonderfully strange, thought-provoking, and hilarious novel defies simple categorization. Is it a study of the soulless mining of personal data for the greediest of ends? Is it a suspenseful tale of a battle of the wills–one Apollonian, the other Dionysian? Is it an artful melding of poetry and prose? Yes and yes and yes. As disparate as these elements may seem, in the end they add up to an entertaining, enlightening whole.

In his gripping and thought-provoking new thriller, Maxine Unleashes Doomsday, Nick Kolakowski imagines a post-apocalyptic, post-United States that feels disturbingly plausible, given the way things are going with our climate, our political divisions, and our growing dependence on technology.

Rising seas have turned New York City–the setting of some key scenes–into a nightmare version of Venice. America is no longer just divided; it’s completely fractured, having descended into a conglomeration of rival clans and territories, the highways connecting them under siege by bandits and patriot-movement-like gangs. And in perhaps the darkest development, artificial intelligence has begun to surpass human intelligence, assuming power-grabbing forms that make Alexa, Siri, and robotic vacuum cleaners look downright quaint by comparison.

This entertaining and deeply affecting novel-in-stories, set in 1919, immerses us in the lives and travails of various members of Doc Bell’s Miracles and Mirth Medicine Show, a traveling ensemble of musicians, acrobats, and other performers who, depending on chemistry or circumstance, find love or discord, common cause or conflict, with their fellow show members. Allen takes us into the heart of these relationships, and into the interior lives of individual characters, creating an illuminating and satisfying experience for readers.

The most enthralling competitions involve equally talented opponents who have something to prove, ideally a something that runs deeper than the game at hand. In his gripping novel Second Story Man, Charles Salzberg immerses us in this very sort of rivalry, delivering far more than just thrills.

A criminal act intensifies the conflict between two estranged and contrary sisters—one a butcher, the other a vegetarian cellist. A mime sublets half of a family’s duplex, then makes them the subject of perhaps the most astonishing trick of his career. A couple enters uncomfortable new terrain in their marriage when one of them believes their toddler has become a devourer of small objects.

This is just a sampling of the offbeat dramas that unfold in Jacob M. Appel’s entertaining and thought-provoking story collection Coulrophobia & Fata Morgana. Instead of running counter to reality, the quirkiness of the stories feels true to the strangeness, and the struggles, of lived experience.