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In a 2012 interview with the Guardian, M John Harrison argued that the segregation of literature into genres is ‘a marketing device that got out of hand’ The complaint is a familiar one among genre authors It is also legitimate Junot Díaz – himself a ‘literary’ author whose work is often infused with a deep respect for science fiction and fantasy – has provocatively described genre fiction as ‘the third world’ of contemporary literature The ‘privileged’ world of literary fiction, Díaz believes, treats genre writers ‘unfairly’, rarely affording them the ‘serious reading’ they deserve Harrison has certainly been read seriously, if not as widely as he deserves Angela Carter, China Miéville, Olivia Laing and Robert Macfarlane are among those who have praised the disquieting clarity of his prose, as well as his restless inventiveness In the Guardian interview, Harrison said that his fiction emerges, in part, as an act of defiance against the limitations of genre He wants to ‘undermine’ the market-hardened borders of genre fiction; to ‘ask what [a genre is] afraid of, what it’s trying to hide – then write that’   You Should Come With Me Now, a new collection of short stories, cements his reputation as a master of what Mark Fisher has termed the ‘weird and the eerie’ The stories – which range in length from flash-fictional paragraphs to haunting, hypnotic tales unfolding over several pages – reflect Harrison’s desire to excavate the disturbing stuff that lurks on the underbelly of genre or at the dark limits of literary fiction There are astral-projecting aliens ‘extruded from a space that wasn’t quite the world’ There’s a vision of Britain occupied by foreign powers and rebranded as ‘Autotelia’ There are magical-seeming edgelands that throb, like the ‘zone’ in Tarkovsky’s Stalker, with buried secrets and inexplicable life These conceits might sound a little outlandish in summary Yet they are anchored throughout by the kinds of resolutely concrete, descriptive ‘residues’ – brand names, physical textures, particular clothing – that Barthes identified as creating ‘the reality effect’ of literature There are references to Duck & Waffle restaurants, the M25, the Shard, ‘a Nikon 775 digital